Unhappy then he was, and daily unhappier. If he asked, ‘Is there a God? do I stand in relation to Him? Has there been One who spoke on earth in the accents of heaven? Is man responsible except to man? Is there a hereafter? Whence came I? Whither am I going?’--the only answer was the echo of his own voice. Culture could tell him all things, save the one thing that his soul needed to know. It might be that that knowledge was for ever hidden. But if so, if the questions that man is compelled to ask are the questions to which an answer is denied, then is life vain, nebulous, self-torturing, nay, it is death. Lonely was Gerald, indescribably lonely. One extract from his papers, written when he had been at college a year and more, may be given here; it will not unfitly bring this chapter to a conclusion. ‘I lay wakeful one night until the night was passing into morning. It was more than I could bear--that aching, terrible void. I could have chosen death rather than that living pain. At last I rose from my bed, half dressed myself, and went out. The night had been rainy. The lamps in the courtyard were just flickering on the verge of extinction; they seemed to me emblems of my own dying faith. For a time I stood upon the bridge, gazing downwards into the dark, sluggish water. Many thoughts, weird and dreadful, coursed through my mind; I can scarcely recall them. But I know I said, standing there, “Is life then worthy to be lived, if such be life? What is it that constrains me to suffer and live? Religion teaches that life is a service, and the living man a soldier set at his post by Divine Will, and it is treachery or cowardice to quit it until He gives the command. But I have done with religion. And if my life is my own, and death is sweeter, or less bitter, than life, why live?” So I said--but not yet, not yet. The roseate light began to play on the eastern horizon. I crossed the courtyard, and returned, not as I had come, but under the shadow of the old ivy-grown wall. When my servant came in the morning I was asleep.’ To this had Gerald Eversley come. ‘And Job spake, and said, Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived. Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it.’ CHAPTER XI THE LIGHT THAT ARISETH IN DARKNESS This story of a youthful friendship hastens to its close. It is time to resume and complete it.