But some day he would make a masterpiece! He was feeling toward the greatest discovery that mortal men had encountered. Everything, he had determined, was a symbol—not just this holy sign and that, but all physical manifestations. With frightened exultation he tried his new power of divination. The hanging lamp swung tinily. He ventured: “If the arc of that moving radiance touches the edge of the bookcase, then it will be a sign that I am to go to South America, under an entirely new disguise, and spend my money.” He shuddered. He watched the lamp’s unbearably slow swing. The moving light almost touched the bookcase. He gasped. Then it receded. It was a warning; he quaked. Would he never leave this place of brooding and of fear—which he had thought so clever a refuge? He suddenly saw it all. “I ran away and hid in a prison! Man isn’t caught by justice—he catches himself!” Again he tried. He speculated as to whether the number of pencils on the table was greater or less than five. If greater, then he had sinned; if less, then he was veritably beyond the law. He began to lift books and papers, looking for pencils. He was coldly sweating with the suspense of the test. Suddenly he cried “Am I going crazy?” He fled to his prosaic bedroom. He could not sleep. His brain was smoldering with confused inklings of mystic numbers and hidden warnings. He woke from a half sleep more vision haunted than any waking thought, and cried: “I must go back and confess! But I can’t! I can’t, when I was too clever for them! I can’t go back and let them win. I won’t let those fools just sit tight and still catch me!” It was a year and a half since Jasper had disappeared. Sometimes it seemed a month and a half; sometimes gray centuries. John’s will power had been shrouded with curious puttering studies; long heavy-breathing sittings with the ouija board on his lap, midnight hours when he had fancied that tables had tapped and crackling coals had spoken. Now that the second autumn of his seclusion was creeping into winter he was conscious that he had not enough initiative to carry out his plans for going to South America. The summer before he had boasted to himself that he would come out of hiding and go south, leaving such a twisty trail as only he could make. But—oh, it was too much trouble. He hadn’t the joy in play-acting which had carried his brother Jasper through his preparations for flight. He had killed Jasper Holt, and for a miserable little pile of paper money he had become a moldy recluse! He hated his loneliness, but still more did he hate his only companions, the members of the Soul Hope Fraternity—that pious shrill seamstress, that surly carpenter, that tight-lipped housekeeper, that old shouting man with the unseemly frieze of whiskers. They were so unimaginative. Their meetings were all the same; the same persons rose in the same order and made the same intimate announcements to the Deity that they alone were his elect.