The church itself, however, was another affair. It was an exquisite piece of early Gothic, nearly perfect of its kind, an authentic bit of the Middle Ages. While the old lady sat rigidly upright in her high-backed pew facing the chancel, her eyes fixed upon the clergyman, her ears struggling to catch and hold every one of the rapid, slovenly, half meaningless words that fell from his lips, the living alert mind by her side could not help reflecting that human nature did not change through the centuries. The Lady Elizabeth and her feudal retainers of six hundred years ago must have been like these! The same shibboleths, the same arcana, the same crude paraphernalia to enable one to make the best of this life and the next! On Helen’s return to the house, full of a sense of duty stoutly performed, she was rewarded by the sight of John. He was sitting in the bow of the drawing-room window to catch the fugitive warmth of an October sun. A bandage was round his head and she was a little shocked to see how pale, how shattered, he looked. But as soon as he saw her he got up at once and took a quick step towards her, both hands held out like an eager, impulsive child. If she had ever doubted her feeling for him, or had not weighed it adequately, their coming together now, in these tragic circumstances, seemed to define it anew. He was looking weak and ill, but apart from that he was much changed in three short days. Since the evening of Thursday, just before he received the enemy’s first blow, he looked older by twenty years. Something had passed out of his nature, something had crept in. He was possessed now by a sense of frustration, anger, defeat. Fully, even whimsically, he was conscious of the unhappy bedfellows who had entered his brain. “It is wonderful,” he said, “how a knock on the head may change a man. The short way to madness, I daresay.” He spoke with a bitterness that did not belong to his nature. Such words did not soften Helen’s distress. They did not arise from physical suffering; there was neither fever nor pain; he was still a little weak, but otherwise not ill. The cause was within, somewhere deep down, at the root of being. Looking at his drawn face and tragic eyes, listening to his slow, enfeebled voice, the words of Saul Hartz came back to her. “He’s down and out already.” Could it be so? Had his will been broken by this blow? Were those high, ennobling hopes which made him the man he was now permanently destroyed? She would not believe it. And yet, as she talked with him, a haunting fear flooded her mind. He was like one who bleeds internally. There was nothing that showed and yet there was dire reason to suspect a lesion of the soul.