Wandering thus, greatly unhappy, my thoughts would often recur for shelter to the peaceful nunnery; to my little loving Patty, the dearest pleader of a sister’s repentance; most, and with a self-humbling remorse, to the faithful, unexacting soul whom I had deserted in the tower. What if I had been misled by specious arguments to wound incurably where I had wrought to cure? Could I ever in that case forgive the false advocate? O, surely there was a greater Nature than she in whose name were perpetrated deeds of violence and reprisal? There was the human, the humorous, the tolerant large philosophy of being which Gogo had revealed in his story of himself. _His_ misfortunes had but made him forswear the false goddess in whom weaker men sought to justify their passions. I could never think of him but as the Pan of these later days--the poor limping Pan of our era, beguiled into a hospital, and persuaded to an operation, and shorn of his limp and his legs together. One might meet him begging on a city bridge, and look wondering down for the song of the water in the rushes that were not; one might read his hairy breast into dreams of red dead bracken, and see his eyes, under their matted brows, like little forest pools reflecting glimpses of the sky, and not guess who he was, for he would never whine of better days. He always took fortune like a fallen god, did Gogo. He always smelt sweet, did my monster. And he had not erred in love before he found me. Could that be said of another? I was never quite able to forget that discarded favourite who had warned a threatened brother and assisted him to escape. Though I had never deigned to give the thought place in my mind, the unacknowledged shadow of it, of what had been her inducement to the act, slept in me, to rise presently and add its quota of darkness to the whole. I was very unhappy--very forlorn and tired and unhappy. But, on that morning, as it blew bitter cold without, and I longed for the fire that was never ours in that chill cellar but by proxy of the chimney-back, I brought myself to go down, and scratch out the signal to Portlock to let me pass if it were practicable. He responded at once, drawing away the grate; and I crept in and through, and stood up on the farther side. Instantly a grumpy exclamation from him, as instantly clapped back with his great hand on his mouth, took my eyes to my skirt, whereto for a flash I had seen his directed. And there, smearing the pale folds of it, was a long, foul streak of blood. “Where did this come from?” I cried in a dismayed voice, for the moment too shocked to reflect. I fancied he shook upon his great gelatinous calves, that the little eyes set in the vast oyster of his face were blinking shiftily, alert to my movements while he turned over the dull masses of his brain for an answer. “Rabbits--dinner,” at length he rumbled.