He never knew how he loosed himself—that moment was blank, stamped with too deep a horror to be ever recalled. He found himself as in a nightmare rushing blindly through the blackness of the fields, feeling as if he could never escape from that lingering touch of contamination, as if no waters could ever lave him from the taint! * * * * * It was only when he was brought to a standstill by the edge of the river, by the Essex stairs, that he realised where his frenzy was taking him, and awoke, as it were, to sanity. But it was with a trembling in every limb and a weakness that forced him to sit on the steps. The water lapped at his very feet, shivering in a little circle of light cast by the stair lantern. He dipped his hand in the dark ripple and began mechanically to lave his brow—to lave, above all, his lips. Thought took coherent shape again.—This was the end of his close-set plans. Madame de Mantes had failed him with a completeness it seemed that must have required Satan’s own ingenuity to devise. Lord Rockhurst had not been unmasked, Diana was with him in his power,—and he, Lionel Ratcliffe (God, with what appalling reason!), was at last afraid of the plague! BROKEN SANCTUARY BROKEN SANCTUARY I THE HAVEN OF REFUGE A red dawn was breaking over London; through the undrawn curtains of the parlour in Lord Rockhurst’s small house in Whitehall, abutting by the Holbein gateway, the first rays darted in to mingle with the dying gleam of a pair of candles that guttered in their sockets. Chitterley—my lord’s old confidential servant, who had shared with him all fortune’s vicissitudes, through prosperity and peace, through war and exile, since the last reign—rose from the high-backed chair upon which he had been dozing, and stretched his stiffened limbs wearily. Muttering to himself, as old people will, he fell with sudden alacrity to replenishing (only just in time, for it was fast going out) the small cresset which burned at his hand. “All good spirits praise the Lord!… Now I pray no misfortune may have happened this night!… Heaven be merciful to us; these be times of terror!” He flung a new handful of herbs upon the rekindled embers, and watched with satisfaction the column of fragrant smoke that rose circling, now blue, now white, to hang in clouds under the ceiling. “’Twas your only remedy against the tainted air,” had said Dr. Garth; and Dr. Garth was the King’s physician. “Morning already—and no sign of his lordship! Had it been a year gone, now, I had got me to my bed, and ne’er a qualm. But these be no times for frolic—and e’en if they were, my lord has had little stomach for it these weeks agone.”