"I am afraid all the evidence points that way," said Potts, and as he had just passed the London matriculation examination, the words rang like a death-knell in Peter's foolish heart. He remembered how the words had recurred to him in his dreams that night, and how he awoke in the gray dawn to find that his pillow was wet with tears. There were many other memories in his book, memories of the long struggle, the wrestling with the angel, and at last the music of that loftier certainty which he longed to impart. A little after midnight, he threw aside the hopeless chaos of the manuscript, into which he had been trying to distil the essence of his scrap-book. He rose and went upstairs to his bedroom on the next floor. It was a little smaller than his sitting-room, and contained a camp-bed, a wash-stand, with a cracked blue jug and basin, and a chest of drawers. Over the head of the bed was a photogravure reproduction of _The Light of the World_; and on the wall, facing it, an illuminated prayer: _Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord_! Under this, affixed to the wall, was the telephone which connected the _Hatchets'_ with the Naval Station on the coast, by an under-sea wire. But in spite of this modern invention, Peter Ramsay had quietly gone back through the centuries. He looked as if he were talking to a very great distance indeed, a distance so great that it became an immediate presence. (Do not mathematicians declare that if you could throw a stone into infinity, it would return to your hand?) He was kneeling down by the bed, clasping his hands, lifting his face, closing his eyes, and moving his lips, exactly like a child at his prayers. It is an odd fact, and doubtless it would have fortified the great ironic intellects of our day (though seventy feet in this unfathomable universe may hardly be reckoned as depth) to know that in the darkness of the reef outside, seventy feet below, four shadowy figures had just landed from a collapsible boat, belonging to the U-99. Three of them were now hauling it out of reach of the waves. The fourth was Captain Bernstein. He stood, fingering his revolver, and looking up at the two lighted windows. Concerning these things, Peter received no enlightenment; but he rose from his knees with a glowing countenance, and hurried down to his work again. "I'll begin at the beginning," he muttered. He took a clean sheet of paper and headed it: _Chapter I_. Under this, he wrote the first four words of the Bible: "_In the beginning, God_." Then he crossed them out, and wrote again: "_First Principles_," as a better means of approach to the moderns. He consulted his ledger, and decided that a certain paragraph, written long ago, must take the first place in his book. He wrote it down just as it stood.