The Mill of Silence by Bernard Capes — Read

My escape from that strong net of fatality that had enmeshed so many years of my still young life, had been, it seemed, only a merciful respite. Now the toils, regathering about me again, woke a spirit of hopeless resignation in me that had been foreign to my earlier mood of resistance. Man has made of himself so plodding an animal as to almost resent the unreality of his brief vacations. He eats his way, like a wood-boring larva, through a monotonous tunnel of routine, satisfied with the thought that some day he may emerge into the light on the other side, ready-winged for flight to the garden of paradise. Perhaps Lazarus was humanly far-seeing in refusing the rich man a drop of water. It would have made the poor wretch's after lot tenfold more unendurable.

Now a feeling came over me that I could struggle no more, but would lie in the web and suffer unresisting the onsets of fate. My father's seizure; Duke's reappearance and his hint as to the visit I was to expect from Jason; the sudden flight of the cripple before the vision of Dr. Crackenthorpe -- all these were strands about my soul with which I would concern myself no longer. I would do my duty, so far as I could, and set my face in one direction and glance aside no more.