"The world!" he said slowly and bitterly. "You think _I_ care for the world? Then you read me wrongly at the very outset of our interview, and your once reputed skill as a Seer goes for naught! To me the world is a graveyard full of dead, worm-eaten things, and its supposititious Creator, whom you have so be praised in your orisons to-night, is the Sexton who entombs, and the Ghoul who devours his own hapless Creation! I myself am one of the tortured and dying, and I have sought you simply that you may trick me into a brief oblivion of my doom, and mock me with the mirage of a life that is not and can never be! How can you serve me? Give me a few hours' respite from wretchedness! that is all I ask!" As he spoke his face grew blanched and haggard, as though he suffered from some painfully repressed inward agony. The monk Heliobas heard him with an air of attentive patience, but said nothing; he therefore, after waiting for a reply and receiving none, went on in colder and more even tones: "I dare say my words seem strange to you--though they should not do so if, as reported, you have studied all the varying phases of that purely intellectual despair which, in this age of excessive over-culture, crushes men who learn too much and think too deeply. But before going further I had better introduce myself. My name is Alwyn ..." "Theos Alwyn, the English author, I presume?" interposed the monk interrogatively. "Why, yes!" this in accents of extreme surprise--"how did you know that!" "Your celebrity," politely suggested Heliobas, with a wave of the hand and an enigmatical smile that might have meant anything or nothing. Alwyn colored a little. "Your mistake," he said indifferently, "I have no celebrity. The celebrities of my country are few, and among them those most admired are jockeys and divorced women. I merely follow in the rear-line of the art or profession of literature--I am that always unluckiest and most undesirable kind of an author, a writer of verse--I lay no claim, not now at any rate, to the title of poet. While recently staying in Paris I chanced to hear of you ..." The monk bowed ever so slightly--there was a dawning gleam of satire in his brilliant eyes. "You won special distinction and renown there, I believe, before you adopted this monastic life?" pursued Alwyn, glancing at him curiously. "Did I?" and Heliobas looked cheerfully interested. "Really I was not aware of it, I assure you! Possibly my ways and doings may have occasionally furnished the Parisians with something to talk about instead of the weather, and I know I made some few friends and an astonishing number of enemies, if that is what you mean by distinction and renown!" Alwyn smiled--his smile was always reluctant, and had in it more of sadness than sweetness, yet it gave his features a singular softness and beauty, just as a ray of sunlight falling on a dark picture will brighten the tints into a momentary warmth of seeming life.