Perhaps few men have ever realized the utter waste of wickedness as Charles Rex realized it that night. He met it whichever way he turned. To gratify the moment's whim had ever been his easy habit. If a generous impulse had moved him, he had gratified that also. But it had never been his way to sacrifice himself--until a certain night when a child had come to him, wide-eyed and palpitating like a driven bird, and had sought shelter and protection at his hands. That, very curiously, had been the beginning of a new era in his life. It had appealed to him as nothing had ever appealed before. He had never tasted--or even desired--the Dead Sea fruit again. Something had entered his being on that night which he had never been able to cast out, and all other things had been dwarfed to insignificance. He faced the fact as he paced his castle walls. The relish had gone out of his life. He was gathering what he had sown, and the harvest was barren indeed. Time passed; he walked unheeding. If he spent the whole night on the ramparts, there was no one to know or care. It was better than tossing sleepless under a roof. He felt as if a roof would suffocate him. But sheer physical weariness began to oppress even his elastic frame at last. He awoke to the fact that he was dead tired. He sat down in an embrasure between the battlements, and drifted into the numb state between waking and sleeping in which visions are born. For a space nothing happened, then quite suddenly, rising as it were out of a void, a presence entered his consciousness, reached and touched his spirit. Intangibly, but quite unmistakably, he was aware of the summons, of a voice that spoke within his soul. He lifted his head and looked about him. Emptiness, stark emptiness, was all he saw. Yet, in a moment, as though a hand had beckoned, he arose. Without a backward glance he traversed the distance that lay between him and the turret-door. He went through it into utter darkness, and in utter darkness began the descent. A shaft of moonlight smote through a slit in the stone wall as he rounded the corner of the stair. It lay like a shining sword across his path, and for a second he paused. Then he passed over it, sure-footed and confident, and plunged again into darkness. When he reached the end of the descent, he was breathing heavily, and his eyes were alight with a strange fire. He pulled upon the door and put aside the thick curtain with the swift movements of a man who can brook no delay. He passed into the long, dim room beyond with its single red lamp burning at the far end. He prepared to pass on to the door that led out upon the gallery and so to the grand staircase. But before he had gone half-a-dozen paces he stopped. It was no sound that arrested, no visible circumstance of any sort. Yet, as if at a word of command, he halted. His quick look swept around the room like the gleam of a rapier, and suddenly he swung upon his heel, facing that still, red light.