He walked out of the room and out of the house, and after waiting at the station whence he despatched a telegram to his housekeeper, who was not expecting him back for two or three days, took the first train—a slow one—to London. In his corner of the railway carriage the much-afflicted man sat motionless, brooding. Everything had happened that could shake to its foundations a man’s faith in humanity, and swallow it up in abysmal darkness. Suddenly, as though by a prearranged design—as we know was the case with his forerunner in the land of Uz—cataclysm after cataclysm had revealed to him the essential baseness, treachery, cruelty of mankind. For in his eyes these were proved to be essential qualities. Had they not been revealed to him, not by fitful gleams, but in one steady lurid glare, in the nature of those who had been nearest to him in the world—Angela, Will Hammersley, Marrable, Huckaby, Vandermeer, Billiter, Mathew Quixtus? If the same hell-streak ran through the souls of these, surely it must run through the souls of all the sons and daughters of Adam. Now here came the great puzzle. Why should he, Ephraim Quixtus, (as far as he could tell) vary from the unkindly race of man? Why hitherto had baseness, treachery, and cruelty been as foreign to his nature as an overpowering inclination towards arson or homicide? Why had he been unequipped with these qualities which appeared to serve mortals as weapons wherewith to fight the common battle of life? The why, he could not tell. That he had them not, was obvious. That he had gone to the wall through lack of them was obvious, too. Instead of the dagger of baseness, the sword of cruelty, the shield of treachery, all finely tempered implements of war, he had been fighting with the wooden lath of virtue and the brawn-buckler of trust. Armed as he should have been, he would have out-manœuvred Marrable at his own game, kept his wife in chaste and wholesome terror of his jealousy, sent Huckaby and Company long since to the limbo where they belonged, deluded his uncle into the belief that he was a devil of a fellow, and now be standing with flapping wings and crowing voice triumphant on this dunghill of a world. But he had been hopelessly outmatched. Whoever had taken upon himself the responsibility of equipping him for the battle of life had been guilty of incredible negligence. But on whom could he call to remedy this defect? Men called on the Unknown God to make them good; but it would be idiotic as well as blasphemous to call on Him to make one bad. How, then, were the essential qualities of baseness, treachery, and cruelty to be captured and brought into his armoury? Perhaps the Devil might help. But we are so matter-of-fact and scientific in these days that even the simple soul of Quixtus could not quite believe in his existence. If he had lived in the Middle Ages (so in scholarly gloom ran his fancy) he could have drawn circles and pentagrams and things on the