"Is he dead?" asked Mendel. "Next door to it," said the policeman. "The woman's done in." "Where?" "At the Pot-au-Feu, Soho." "Where is he now?" "Workhouse infirmary. If you want to see him the police will raise no objection." "Thank you," said Mendel. He asked the direction and set out at once. The workhouse was a dull grey mass of buildings, rising out of a dull grey district like an inevitable creation of its dullness, and it seemed an inevitable contrast to the Merlin's Cave, so that it was right that Logan should walk out of the glitter into it. This was the very contrast that Mendel's imagination had been vainly seeking, and now, with the violence of a sudden release, his thoughts began to work again. . . . Oliver was dead. That was inevitable too. But why? Logan had surrendered to her. They would go home from the Merlin's Cave to the Pot-au-Feu, to Hetty Finch's room. He would surrender to her absolutely, because she had willed his destruction and could not see that his destruction meant her own. She wanted recognition, acknowledgment that her vitality was more important than anything else in the world, and she had brought Logan to it. There had been a cold, set purpose in his eyes last night--an intellectual purpose. The equation was worked out. She could have what she wanted, at a price. She could destroy the will and the desire of a man, but not his mind, not his spirit, which would still be obedient to a higher will, and that would break her as she had broken. Very bare and grim was the waiting-room in which Mendel had to bide until the nurse came for him. Its walls were of a faded green, dim and grimy, and when the door was opened as people went in or out, there was wafted in a smell of antiseptics. But as his thoughts gathered force the room seemed to be filled with a great light, which revealed beauty in the poor people waiting patiently to see their sick. They became detached and pictorial, but he could not think of them in terms of paint. His mind had begun to work in a new way, and he felt more solid, more human, more firmly planted on the ground, as though at last he was admitted to a place in life. It mattered to him no more that he was a Jew and strange and foreign to the Christian world. There were neither Jews nor Christians now. There were only people--tragic, wonderful people . . . He even forgot that he was in love. All his mind was concentrated upon Logan, who was now also tragic and wonderful, a source of tragedy and wonder, and his whole effort was to discover and to make plain to himself his share in the tragedy: not to weigh and measure and to wonder whether at one point or another he could have stopped it. Nothing could have stopped it. There was no room for judgment in this tragic world. A nurse came to fetch him. She said:-- "He is very weak, but he will be strong enough to know you. Don't excite him."