He pushed open the door. The darkness here had been relieved by somebody who had opened one window and unshuttered two others. The room was in disorder, chairs remained where the sitters had left them, and the cold gray light of morning looked upon tarnished gilding and faded damask, and the tawdry litter of the night before. Merciless, pitiless, contemptuous was the sneer of the clean dawn. Ronald's smile deepened. And then he caught a reflection of himself in one of the long mirrors. He looked pale and drawn. He shivered. Not because the mirror gave back the illusion of a sick man--he knew well enough he was healthy--but because he glimpsed the something in his eyes, the leering devil that sat behind the levers and turned the switches of desire. A car was waiting for him at the end of the slumbering street. Madame did not like cars at the door in the early hours of the morning, and he stepped in, wrapping his coat about him. The sun had not yet risen and Wechester was a two hours run with a clear road. Sault was in Wechester Gaol awaiting the dread hour, and from somewhere in Lancashire, a gaunt-faced barber who had marked in his diary the date of an engagement, had taken train to Ronald's destination, carrying with him the supple straps that would bind the wrists of the living and be slipped from the wrists of the dead. The clear sky gave promise of a perfect winter day, but the morning air was cold. He pulled up the windows of the car and wished he had bought a newspaper or book to wile away the time. In two hours the soul of Ambrose Sault-- The soul! What was the soul? Was it Driesh's "Entelechy;" that "innnermost secret" of animation? Was there substance to the soul? Was it material? A flame, Merville had once called it, a flame from a common fire. Could the flame leap at will from a man's body and leave him--what? A lunatic, a madman, a beast without reason? Ronald shrugged away the speculation, but the scholar in him was uneasy and insensibly he came back to the problem. The promise of fair weather was belied as the car drew nearer to Wechester. A mist, thin and white, lay like a blanket on the streets, and Ronald's car "hawked" its way into the still thicker mist which lay on Wechester Common. The car drew up at the prison gates, and he looked at his watch. It wanted a quarter of nine. Ronnie saw a thin man, thinly clad, walking up and down outside. His hair was long and fell over his coat collar, his nose was red with the cold, and now and again he stopped to stamp his feet. Ronnie wondered who he was. A wicket opened at his ring, and he showed his authority through the bars before, with a clang and a clatter of turning locks and the thud of many bolts, the door swung open and he found himself in a square stone room furnished with a desk, a high stool and one chair.