--She was sleeping now, in the quiet house by the sea. The horn of a motor-car tooted in St. James' Street below--She was sleeping now in her quiet chamber. Tired lids covered the frank, blue eyes, the thick masses of yellow hair were straying over the linen pillow. She was dreaming of him as the night wind moaned about the house. He threw himself upon his knees by the bedside, in dreadful drunken surrender and appeal. --"Father help me! Jesus help me!--forgive me!"--he dare not invoke the Holy Ghost. He shrank from that. The Father had made everything and had made him. He was a beneficent, all-pervading Force--He would understand. The Lord Jesus was a familiar Figure. He was human; Man as well as God. One could visualise Him. He had cared for harlots and drunkards! . . . Far down in his sub-conscious brain Lothian was aware of what he was doing. He was whining not to be hurt. His prayers were no more than superstitious garrulity and fear. Something--a small despairing part of himself, had climbed upon the roof of the dishonoured Temple and was stretching trembling hands out into the overwhelming darkness of the Night. "Father, help me! Help me _now_. Let me go to bed without phantoms and torturing ghosts round me! Do not look into the Temple to-night. I will cleanse it to-morrow. I swear it! Father! Help me!" He began to gabble the Lord's Prayer--that would adjust things in a sort of way--wouldn't it? There was a promise--yes--one said it, and it charmed away disaster. Half-way through the prayer he stopped. The words would not come to him. He had forgotten. But that no longer distressed him. The black curtain of stupor was descending once more. "'Thy will be done'--what _did_ come after? Well! never mind!" God was good. He'd understand. After all, intention was everything! He scrambled into bed and instantly fell asleep, while the lovely face of Rita Wallace was the first thing that swam into his disordered brain. In a remote village of Norfolk, not a quarter of a mile from Gilbert Lothian's own house, a keen-faced man with a pointed beard, a slim, alert figure like an osier wand and steely brown eyes was reading a thin green-covered book of poems. Now and then he made a pencil note in the margin. His face was alive with interest, almost with excitement. It was as though he were tracing something, hunting for some secret hidden in the pages. More than once he gave a subdued exclamation of excitement. "It's there!" he said at last to himself. "Yes, it is there! I'm sure of it, quite apart from what I've heard in the village since I came." He rose, put the book carefully away in a drawer, locked it, blew out the lamp and went to bed. Three hundred miles away in Cornwall, a crippled spinster was lying on her bed of pain in a cottage by the sea. The windows of her room were open and the moon-rays touched a white Crucifix upon the wall to glory. The Atlantic groundswell upon the distant beaches made a sound as of fairy drums.