That was the case, no doubt, but a compromise was equally impossible. Something would have to happen. Either he must go forward or he must go back. A soul in strange, terrible torment passed unseen and unseeing through the tiny hamlet of Easing and on and on up a steep hill and then down through a long valley of trees and a gloom of massively beautiful furze country. There was not a ripple of wind in the tense air, and in the early afternoon it grew very dark, with an occasional growl of thunder over the far hills. On the outskirts of Chettleford it began to rain in large slow drops; and as his sweating face perceived the soft, cool splash he half dared to take it as the explicit kindness of Heaven. Upon the wings of that thought came the automatic intrusion into his mind of the words: Methought I saw my late espousèd saint Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave. And with them came the strange fancy that these tears out of Heaven were those of his wife and his boy. A mile beyond Chettleford, at the dark edge of a wood, the sudden fear struck him that the soul of Thomas Perry-Hennington was about to enter unending night. A recollection dread and spectral, which might have been Dante or the far distant ages of the past, engulfed him swiftly and completely. It was impossible to turn back now or he would have done so. The narrow road grew darker and darker as it wound under the heavy, rain-pattered canopy of the wood. Earth and sky were without form, and void. He lost touch with time and place; he began to lose touch with his own identity. He only knew that Thomas Perry-Hennington was his name and that his destination was Wellwood Asylum. The rain grew heavier, but there was no comfort in it now. He was already far beyond any kind of physical aid. A grisly demon was in him, urging him onward to his doom. His soul’s reaction to it was beyond pity and terror. Quite suddenly, and long before he expected to see them, the heavy iron gates of the asylum were before him. At the sound of wheels an old man, very bent and grim, whom in the wet half-light he almost took for Charon, came slowly out of his lodge and fitted a key to the lock. XLV THE vicar and his trap passed through the gates of Wellwood and along a short drive, flanked by wet bushes of rhododendron to the main entrance. In a voice not at all like his own he said to a heavy, rather brutal-looking man who opened one of the doors, “Mr. Perry-Hennington to see Dr. Thorp.” He was admitted at once to a dim, somber interior, and shown into a small, stuffy waiting room in which he could hardly breathe. It was perhaps a relief to find himself quite alone, but in a very short time the doctor came to him. The two men were known to each other. It was not Mr. Perry-Hennington’s first visit to Wellwood; and from time to time they had sat together on various committees affecting the social welfare of the county.