Merely a trick of imagination—and yet it tortured. One knew by sensations like these that one had been frightfully overstrained of late. One had done lots of things one regretted—several things one disliked to think of; one thing that made one hate oneself sometimes with a very fury of intensity, when one wasn’t too busy hating _him_. But since he was drowned, one had felt it scarcely cricket to go on expending fierce resentment and savage disgust and acute loathing in that direction. One heaped it on the living of the two gross, sensual offenders. Oh God! when Sherbrand had said in that tone of triumph: "_I come to you clean!_" How inexpressibly one had abominated oneself. How one had shrunk against the side of the taxicab, pretending to look after wretched little decadent Wyvenhoe and the unquenchable Mrs. Mallison—feigning sudden absorption in the Piccadilly shop-windows, to escape those clear undoubting eyes that pierced one to the very soul. To be thought good when one was wicked, pure when one was the other thing; believed candid when one was a living lie. Ah!—that not only pierced but scorched. If anybody, a month or so back, had asked Patrine: "Are you a Christian?" she would have retorted: "What are you playing at? Of course I am—I suppose!" Of late that conjectural Being she had called God had receded, faded, grown dimmer, and vanished. But here in the stillness, looking towards the Altar, she was conscious as those candle-flames went up like prayers from faithful souls, that Good and Evil were living warring Forces. You chose White or Black deliberately, and when Death came—it was anything but the end. Her hair stiffened slightly on her scalp and a light shudder thrilled through her. She felt with a growing awe, and sense of dreadful certainty, that Someone was looking at her. And to relieve the insupportable tension she stretched out her hand, and took a squat, thick little book from the shelf below the seat in front of her. It was a copy of the Douai translation from the Latin Vulgate of the Bible, and there was a purple marker where she opened it, in the middle of the Book of Job. "_Power and terror are with Him...._" That was the first line that caught her eye. A little lower on the page came: "_Was it not Him that made life? Hell is naked before Him and there is no covering for destruction.... He stretched out the North over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing._ "_He hath set bounds about the waters, till light and darkness come to an end...._ "_The pillars of heaven tremble and dread at His beck. By His power the seas are suddenly gathered together, and His Wisdom hath struck the proud one._ "_His Spirit hath adorned the heavens ... and seeing we have heard scarce a little drop of His Word, who shall be able to withstand the thunder of His greatness?_"