There came the sound of the bell for luncheon, and he got up.... It was a strange thing that anyone so diligent in evil as the old man had been, should at the end of his life have turned coward and twitterer in the way he had done. His last year on earth had been a terrible one, for, so family tradition averred (and indeed the thing was attested), terror of what was coming fastened on his flesh like a monstrous growth, and he wrote no more in his diary of the sins that were so dear to him. He practised pious and charitable deeds, restoring the monastery church, on the altar of which he had often played dice. He endowed almshouses in Rye. He bought great tomes of the works of Christian fathers, and of the meditations of the Saints, and hour after hour he used to sit in the library to study these under the tuition of a priest who resided in the house, and ministered at the church, and no doubt it was then that he destroyed or dispersed that great collection of magical and occult works which he had brought together, for no vestige of them was now extant here. He cut himself off from the pleasures of youth, he fasted and prayed, in the hope of turning away the fate at which all his life he had mocked, and it was said that when on his knees he attempted to address the God whom he had rejected, no prayer or holy words would come from his lips, but that he mumbled unspeakable and obscene blasphemies. He seemed in fact, so it appeared to Colin, to have gone crazy, and though he continued throughout that year in the full serenity of his physical health, he let himself be the prey of his disordered and terrified soul, turning and truckling, not in love but in abject fear of the destiny he had chosen, to Him whose spirit he had defied. It was firmly rooted in his head, that he would die on his seventieth birthday, and that indeed (no doubt because he so firmly believed it) came to pass, and in an appalling manner. For he gave a feast that night to his tenants in honour of his birthday, and had risen to speak to them at the end of supper, when he put out his arm, as if pushing away some invisible presence, and shrieking “No, no!” fell forward, dead, across the table. At that moment there came a blinding flash of lightning, which certainly struck the hall, but those who were nearest to him said that his seizure had preceded the flash, and that it and the roar of thunder that followed were rather the endorsement of that judgment than the judgment itself. That year, anyhow, thought Colin, was a common and craven conclusion to his brilliant life; he did not fancy that he himself would suffer so deplorable a collapse, legend or no legend. But in the interval, he had more than all his ancestor’s lust for pleasure, and his hatred of love....