Had he been as he supposed himself to be, he would have sought rest at once. He would have hurried joyously from temptation in this freedom from his chains. Instead of that, the question he asked himself was, "What shall I do now?" The glutton crams himself at certain stated periods. But when repletion comes he stops eating. The habit is rhythmic and periodically certain. But the Drunkard--his far more sorrowful and lamentable brother--has not even this half-saving grace. In common with the inordinate smoker--whose harm is physical and not mental--the inebriate drinks as long as he is able to, until he is incapacitated. "Where shall I go now?" If God does indeed give human souls to His good angels, as gardens to weed and tend, that thought must have brought tears of pity to the eyes of the august beings who were battling for Gilbert Lothian. Their hour was not yet. They were to see the temple of the Paraclete fall into greater ruin and disaster than ever before. The splendid spires and pinnacles, the whole serene beauty of soul and body which had made this Temple a high landmark when God first built it, were crumbling to decay. Deep down among the strong foundations the enemy was at work. The spire--the "Central-one"--which sprang up towards Heaven was deeply undermined. Still--save to the eyes of experts--its glory rose unimpaired. But it was but a lovely shell with no longer any grip upon its base of weakened Will. And the bells in the wind-swept height of the Tower no longer rang truly. On red dawns or on pearl-grey evenings the message they sent over the country-side was beginning to be false. There was no peace when they tolled the Angelus. In oriel or great rose-window the colour of the painted glass was growing dim. The clear colour was fading, though here and there it was shot with baleful fire which the Artist had never painted there,--like the blood-shot eyes of the man who drinks. A miasmic mist had crept into the noble spaces of the aisles. The vast supporting pillars grew insubstantial and seemed to tremble as the vapour eddied round them. A black veil was quickly falling before the Figure above the Altar, and the seven dim lamps of the Sanctuary burned with green and flickering light. The bells of a Great Mind's Message, which had been cast with so much silver in them, rang an increasing dissonance. The trumpets of the organ echoed with a harsh note in the far clerestory; the flutes were false, the _dolce_ stop no longer sweet. The great pipes of the pedal organ muttered and stammered in their massive voices, as if dark advisers whispered in the ear of the musician who controlled them. Lothian had passed from one great Palace of Drink. "Where shall I go?" he asked himself again, and immediately his eye fell upon another, the brilliant illumination upon the façade of a well-known "Theatre of Varieties." His hot eye-balls drank in the flaring signs, and telegraphed both an impulse and a memory to his brain.