But Alistair was beginning to look deeper. The play he had just witnessed, in spite of its absurdities, had embodied certain sentiments of his own. “There is no cure,” he reflected as he walked along. “There is no help for men like me; the crowd will always persecute us. They have set up the image of the Crucified One that they might crucify others in his name. The memory of Otway did not save Chatterton; the sufferings of Chatterton did not redeem Poe. Their flattery of the dead is only a deeper insult to the living. They kneel at the tomb of Shakespeare, and if Shakespeare rose again they would cast him into Reading Gaol.” It was Alistair Stuart’s misfortune to be only a half-hearted sinner. The world likes its men to be thorough-going. Confronted with a mixed individuality it is disconcerted and annoyed, like a reviewer called upon to judge a poem by a prose-writer, or a serious volume from a humorist’s pen. Alistair’s natural instincts had been cowed by his boyish experience. Without sharing the convictions of the righteous, he lacked the courage to despise them utterly. He would have had them pardon him, though he could not repent. His embittered mood lasted till he came in sight of the river below Battersea Park. The sunlight sparkling on the water, and the fresh breeze blowing over the trees of the park, refreshed him for the moment, and his thoughts turned to Hero Vanbrugh. A sigh rose to his lips. “If I had only met her a year ago!” The rebuke which Hero had administered so delicately in the matter of the royal autograph had moved him to the heart. It had been an appeal to his self-respect, a proof that she credited him with honourable instincts like her own, and at this crisis in his life the compliment was like the touch of balm upon a sore. With such a hand as Hero’s to restrain him, that plunge into the social underworld which he was contemplating lost its fascination. How was it that in all the years they had known him neither his mother nor his brother had ever been able to strike the chord which this girl’s finger had touched unerringly at their first meeting? In searching for the answer to this riddle, he recollected whither his steps were bound. The figure of Molly Finucane rose before him like a faded portrait over which a breath of discoloration had passed, leaving it tarnished and dingy, and he shivered slightly, and unconsciously relaxed the quickness of his pace. His heart sank within him as he ascended the familiar path, and let himself in with his latchkey. Missing the expected figure of the page, he hung up his hat himself, and passed into the drawing-room. “Where’s Tom?” he inquired, not without some foreboding of the reply he should receive.