Then suddenly, for some unaccountable reason, the thought of the face of Him whom he had seen the day before flashed upon his mind. Was there any truth at all in what was said about Him? Maybe that Man could help him. Why not go and find Him and speak to Him? A dull, latent acknowledgment of the absurdity of the sudden notion that had seized him lay inertly beneath the thought, but the thought itself had somehow seized upon him very closely, just as it had seized upon him the day before. Why not go and find this strange Man and talk with Him? Anyhow, it would be something to do to distract him from thinking about his disappointments, and he would escape the annoyance of meeting the men as they came into the club. Maybe to-morrow, after he had had a good night's sleep, he could better bear meeting and answering them. Just now this other thing would give him something to do. He aroused himself and jerked back his chair. He looked at his watch and saw that it was half-past twelve. Then he went up into the dining-room and ordered himself a breakfast. As he sat looking up, passively, at Norcott's great picture of the nude Venus surrounded by a flock of naked, fluttering Cupids, he again inertly made up his mind that he would go down to Brookfield by the two-twenty train. "Anyhow," he repeated to himself, "it will give me something to do." Then the waiter came, bringing the cocktail that he had ordered. XII THE ONE THING WE LACK GILDERMAN, when he left the club, found that he was in that peculiar psychological state that comes upon one now and then--a state in which one feels that one has not altogether determined to do a certain thing and yet finds one's self in the very act of doing it. As it had been the day before, so now he found himself possessed by a strange impulsion that drove him forward as though not of his own volition. He walked briskly down towards the depot, but it did not seem to him that he even yet had made up his mind to embark upon the undertaking. Even when he found himself in the depot looking up at the time-clocks, and saw that the next train left in ten minutes--even when he had bought his ticket, it did not seem to him that he had actually determined to do what he was about to do. Such times of almost involuntary progression towards some object comes now and then to every man. It is as though there was some inner will-force that subjected the outer actions, urging them forward to carry the intention through to its conclusion. Gilderman's mind did not actually resist the impulse that led him to go down to Brookfield. He yielded himself to going, but, at the same time, he did not yield a full and complete concurrence to that inner motive that impelled him to go. The cause of inspiration, though he did not know it, was very profound. It seemed to him that he simply allowed himself to drift as circumstances directed.