That he was to be hurt in the new war was in itself but a vague anxiety, dull of consideration except for its relation to the foretelling--that another was to come to help him!... He wondered if the wound would come from his enemies. Once before, a night in Madras, as he was entering a house of hiding a noose of leather dropped upon his shoulder. It was jerked tight with a sinister twang. Routledge had just escaped the garrote in the dark. He could not always escape; and yet he was not to die next time. Rawder said: ... “To fall wounded, apart from the battle-field, to lie helplessly regarding men and events from the fallen state, instead of face to face--this was but one of the tossing tragedies of cloud in his mind. Yet there was a radiant light in the midst of it all--only one woman in the world’s half-billion would come to him.” Any suffering was cheap to prevent her coming--but he could not prevent! One cannot run from a vision or a prophecy. It is well to obey when one is ordered up into Nineveh. Even Sekar had cast him off, because he was a counter-attraction to the soul of Rawder. He could not forswear war--and so avoid the promised wound, which would enable her to find him--since he was not to meet the levelling stroke during a collision of troops, but somewhere apart. It was a chain of circumstances in which he was absolutely powerless--and she was coming to him! First, it would mean that Jerry Cardinegh, the man he had preserved, was dead. If he were dead with his secret, Noreen would find him--Routledge--identify herself with the most loathed of outcasts, fleeing forever before the eyes and fingers of England. There was rebellion against this in every plane of the man’s consciousness. He could not suffer his love, nor hers, to be tested by such a tragedy. He would flee again from her.... But if old Jerry had remembered the truth at the last--if the fates had willed him to tell the monstrous truth--and the Hate of London were lifted from the name of Routledge, to become a heritage of Noreen Cardinegh--and then if she should come to him! He could not cover his eyes to the flash of radiance which this thought brought him.... He would have died to prevent such a thing from coming to pass. For more than a year, he had kept out of the ken of the world, to forestall any efforts on the part of the Cardineghs, to find him. He was worn to a shadow, hunted, harrowed, hated, lost to himself in disguises, ever apart from the gatherings of men and the decent offerings of life--all to prevent the very thing which, in thinking of now, lit every lamp of his being. Quite as readily would he have performed the treachery for which he suffered as return to the father of Noreen Cardinegh, saying: “I am tired, Jerry. Give me back my name.” But if, after all he had done to spare her from the truth, the fates ruled against him--_then_ he would not flee from her!