"Yes," said Harkness, dragging his eyes with strange difficulty from the pursed white face, the red hair, and glancing about the dim faded room and the farther spaces where the jewels flashed in the candle-light. "Many people would have called my father insane, did not hesitate to do so. He was a large, extremely powerful man, given to violent tempers. But, after all, what is insanity? There are cases--many I suppose--where the brain breaks down and is unable to perform any longer its ordinary functions, but in most cases insanity is only the name given by envious persons to those who have strength of character enough to realise their own ideas regardless of public opinion. Such was my father. He cared nothing for public opinion. We led a strange life, he and I, in a big black house in Bloomsbury. Yes, black, that's how it was. I went to Westminster School, and they all mocked me, my hair, my body, my difference. Yes, my difference. I was different from them all, different from my father, different from all the world. And I was glad that I was different. I hugged my difference. Different. . . ." He lent forward, tapped Harkness's knee with his hand, staring into his face. "Different, Mr. Harkness, different. Different. . . ." And the long draughty room echoed "Different . . . different . . . different." "My father beat me one night terribly, beat me so that I could not move for pain. For no reason, simply because, he said, he wished that I should understand life, and first to understand life one must learn to suffer pain, and that then, if one could suffer pain enough, one could be as God--perhaps greater than God. "It was to that night in the Bloomsbury house that I owe everything. I was fifteen years of age. He stripped me naked and made me bleed. It was terribly cold, and I came in that bare room right into the very heart of life, into the heart of the heart, where the true meaning is at last revealed--and the true meaning----" He broke off suddenly, then whispered: "Do you believe in God, Mr. Harkness?" and the draught went whispering on hands and feet round the room, "Do you believe in God, Mr. Harkness?" "Yes," said Harkness. "Yes," said Crispin, in his lovely melodious voice; "but in a good God, a sweet God, a kind beneficent God. That is no God. God is first cruel, terrible, lashing, punishing. Then when He has punished enough, and the victim is in His power, bleeding at His feet, owning Him as Lord and Master, then He bends down and lifts the wounded brow and kisses the torn mouth, and in His heart there is a great and mighty triumph. . . . Even so will I do, even so will I be . . . and greater than God Himself!" There was silence in the room. Then he curled up in his chair as he had done before, and went on with his friendly air: