soning with the blasphemous sneer, taken from the collect itself: "Holy comfort, forsooth, holy comfort!"

I wrote stubbornly on to the end of Mr. Barker's beautifully written thoughts, and at the end the voice ran away with me: "Only think highly enough of your cause and the rest shall be added unto you, O fighters for Christ's Church of England the rival fleet destroyed, your vast possessions secured and enlarged and huge trade gained. Then indeed shall England bless the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him for ever; and once more shall the church bells toll happily throughout the length and breadth of the land."

I listened to the voice exactly as I might have listened to an agitator in Hyde Park or to some low fellow whom I disliked and despised. My mind stiffened against its sneers; and I proceeded carefully to transcribe the next piece, which Beach had read to me. The voice was silent until with everstiffening mind I approached the last sentence, sure that I had silenced its impertiences.

As I laid down my pen, however, it spoke again, quite gently, almost sweetly, and without the least hint of malice: "Here is a man, a wise man, a man of influence and standing, to whom the war has brought calm after chaos. For him the war must be a great blessing, and the Hun the great benefactor. No thinker worries him any more. Thought is silent. Every form of thought is shaken by the horror of war; but religion is never shaken. The intellectual dominance totters and falls; truth bows

to the censor's idea of expediency, but religion is never shaken. Religion smiles. Religion finds holy comfort. Established religion strikes new roots and is more deeply established in the earth. These months of war have brought to England such peace as she has not possessed for generations. Oh, let England bless the Lord and bless the Hun, the Lord's minister, for the individual is less gloomy; a spirit of fellowship with its attendant cheerfulness has been spread abroad. Religion is never shaken by war. Religion finds holy comfort. Religion can convert any sore to the stigma of martyrdom."

So this voice persisted, softly, sweetly persisted; and I knew it for the voice of the intellect, the voice of the devil, the wicked voice of my madness. At that moment I knew what my familiar had meant by his affection of sorrow. I stood up, hot-eyed in fury. I knew him what he was.

I cried out: "Mocker, tormentor!
Mocker, tormentor! Get thee be-

hind me!"

But my Byronic mood would not stand the sound of my own voice in an empty room. I collapsed, shuddering.

"Why

"It's not fair. It's not fair," I moaned. can't you let me alone? Why need you infect my heart and mind with these rank thoughts and feelings? I should be ashamed if any man knew I harboured them."

I became, without resistance, limp and weak; and all comfort was beaten out of my heart and mind by thoughts, as the strength may be beaten out of a man's body by rods.

Men like Beach don't know. They dare not suffer. They take good care to find immediate consolation. The Church resembles Nero, fiddling over burning Rome.

"Let me go mad," I whimpered. "Let me go mad sooner than take such holy comfort."

And there, on the instant, before me, in a brighter light than I had ever seen him, stood my familiar with a look of triumph in his eyes.

I knew towards what he was luring me, and I lost consciousness in terror. My last thought was the conviction, the hope almost, that I should come to myself in an asylum; be done for ever with this intolerable fear of madness which must be worse than madness itself, and even as I tottered my surrender was complete.

But I was not released from the responsibility of supposed sanity. I awoke on the floor to the one dull fact that I must get into my bedroom somehow before I was sick.

XI

I SAW no meaning in any of these happenings. The only thing for which I was grateful was that Amy was busy, and that I was left alone. I wrote to her once a week, and trusted that she would find some wounded hero more to her taste than myself. She was working hard, and her letters shortened. They lacked, I was thankful to find, any such appeal for intimacy as had disconcerted me in the letter she wrote me while staying in the house. The fact is I abandoned the effort to become the man I wanted to be. I felt that it was no use, though I still felt that my intention with Amy had been as right as my intention in turning to the Church for support. But the failure of the effort in both cases left me in a worse plight than that in which I had been.

I forced myself to go to church so that Beach might not suspect that his comfort had been unavailing. At first I felt that I must go and denounce him, so furious was I at the fall which had come to me through trusting to his support; but luckily I had the grace to do no such selfish thing, and I carefully hid my misery from his view.

I shook his hand, when next I saw him, and with a lingering pressure I said, "Thank you so much for all you've done for me "; and I grinned inside, with

out a thought of my grin's injustice, at the ease with which it was possible to make him believe what he wished to believe.

"And the tablets?" he inquired, returning my tone of voice and my hand's pressure.

"I take them regularly," I assured him.

The allurement of my grandfather's note-books increased for me, and I continued idly to read them, idly to transcribe passages here and there. There was a satanic pleasure in sandwiching the extracts which Beach had kindly lent me between the poor old fellow's savage outbursts. I came upon a quiet passage, however, which touched me more closely than many a tirade. It ran:

"Man has even forgotten how to stand. He stands now on his heels, which throws the belly and neck forward. His base should not be the heel, but the ball of the foot, and she should use the diaphragm to support the top weight; then, stretched, he can move as one piece, using his weight to help him instead of dragging it after him. The Greeks knew this; a blind puppy could see, if he looked that they possessed a secret of movement which has been

lost."

A proof of my apathy was that I read this passage with only mild interest, though it recalled the odd connection between my grandfather, Corinna and my familiar.

Day followed day of dead endurance. Summer came, and still men blew each other to pieces with explosives, and seemed likely to continue to do so as long as any explosives lasted in the world, while