Oh, had he but knocked me on the head a quarter of an hour ago it would have been easier! Then had I been at rest, with those who had built desolate palaces for themselves before me. Or could I but have believed what he so firmly believed! Yet must I not almost believe it? Had he not now almost compelled me? What I had feared to find that morning at St Briac, the morning after the first meeting of their eyes over the car, had not happened, but something no less profound had. That hard clear obstruction that had stood immutably between him and life all his days had been taken away. I remembered my speculation as to whether there were not two loves, Jennie's and Julia's, a sacred and a profane. Two? How if he were right, and there were not two loves, but one love only, which is simply--Love? What then became of all my arithmetic, my rectitude, my conventions, even my duty to my friends? What, by comparison with that love, that law-annihilating love that breaks the invisible adamant fetters that bind the old Adam and bids the new man stand forth, were any or all of these things? They were no more than those social rates and taxes, registrations, commitments, undertakings, contracts, all the rest of the paper business of our lease of life on which he had lately poured his scorn. The infinitude of passion and suffering of a single human soul seemed to me to dwarf them all. And if a man must sin, let him sin at the fringe and circumference of things, not at their centre. Could he give me any assurance whatever of these things he ached no more to enter his heaven than I ached to thrust him in. Every four seconds, every eleven seconds, Fréhel opened the furnace of his white and blazing eye. Tremulously in and out of the gloom the Calvary seemed to advance and to recede again. Dimly I distinguished Derry's face--young, faithful, agonised, interceding for his lovelier self.... It is a fearful responsibility a man past his prime assumes when he bids such a creature to hope no more, but to veil his face and to return to the pit whence he was digged.... And how had he offended me? He had merely received a note--had not even given it, but had simply accepted it and held for a moment the fingers that had passed it.... Had I, in my own insignificant youth, never done such a thing? "Derry," I said gently, "I can't go over old ground again. At present--I say at present--I'm staying in the house. I must now decide how much longer I can stay there. But first tell me exactly what it is you propose to do." "I haven't any intentions at all, sir." "At present you haven't. You hadn't before, but that didn't last. What is it you want?" "Only that you shouldn't thrust me back into--that other." "And then?" "I can't think beyond that, sir." "But there will be something beyond that." He was silent while the Light revolved twice, thrice, then: