His black arts were neither secret nor sublime, but the openly belauded methods of investigation, involving the tortures of sentient beings for the sake of learning the idle arts these pedants taught at the schools. He, too, had invoked the aid of the sullen forces of Nature, from which he had thrust Nature’s God, and they had done his bidding in a way—and the way was hopeless and dark. He had long felt this reckoning-day with himself must come; he was too honest to go on much longer leaving the question of his responsibility unsettled; he was too healthy-brained to give way to despair, till he had found a _modus vivendi_ with his better nature impossible. Early bereft of a mother’s care, his father, wholly absorbed in his literary pursuits, and keeping up merely the slightest correspondence with his son, whom he had apparently almost forgotten, Elsworth had very few family ties, and was perfectly master of his own position. He had no fear of his father’s withdrawing his allowance of £300 a year. As it happened, he had the day before been paid a sum of rather over £100 by his agents; he was not in debt, save in a small sum to his landlady, and the hospital beadle, with some trifling amounts in the neighbourhood of St. Bernard’s which his man of business would pay. Why not cut the old familiar scenes? The wilderness period has to be gone through by every man with a work to do; the retreat is salutary for the stricken soul. Why not enter into it at once? He was a man of resolute will, possessed by a strong determination when the right and proper thing to be done confronted him. He had true stuff in his composition; originality, firm purpose. Boldness to do and dare came to him from his father, who had won his promotion in Indian warfare through a grandly conceived and brilliantly original movement, which had insured the enemy’s defeat at the moment his own seemed imminent. It should be done; he would go away early in the morning light. “Let him that is on the house-top not come down to take anything out of the house.” And he went not down, nor took anything of his old life, but made straight for Paris that same day, for, like his father when he made his brilliant move, he had formed a plan and carried it out. He gave directions to his lawyer to discharge all claims upon him, to say that he had gone abroad, and would not return for some time, but begged him not to disclose his whereabouts to any one without first communicating with him at the address he should forward, when he had chosen his headquarters. Now he began to enter into himself. He must seek some hallowed place of prayer to consecrate his remaining years to God, and renew his baptismal vows, to drink a deep draught of the Divine Spirit as he entered on his new work.