Llwellyn groaned again. In this supreme hour of torture the sensualist was nearer collapse than the ascetic. His life told heavily. He looked up. His face was green-grey save where, here and there, his fingers had pressed into, and left red marks upon, the cheeks, which had lost their firmness and begun to be pendulous and flabby. "What do you think must be the end?" he said. "The end is here," said Schuabe. "What matters the form or manner of it? They may bring in a bill and hang us, they will certainly give us penal servitude for life, but probably we shall be torn in pieces by the mob. There is only one thing left." He made an expressive gesture. Llwellyn shuddered. "All is not necessarily at an end," he said. "I shall make a last effort to get away. I have still got the clergyman's clothes I wore when I went to Jerusalem. There will be time to get out of London before this evening." "All over the continent and America you would be known. There is no getting away nowadays. As for me, I shall go down to my place in Manchester by the mid-day train. There is just time to catch it. And there I shall die before they can come to me." He got up and strode away out of the flat with a set, stern face. Never a passing look did he give to the man he had enriched and damned for ever. Never a gesture of farewell. Already he was as one in the grave. Llwellyn, left to himself in the silent, richly furnished flat, fell into hysterical sobbing. His big body shook with the vehemence of his unnatural terror. His moans and cries were utterly without dignity or pathos. He was filled with the immense self-pity of the sensualist. It is the added torture which comes to the evil-liver. In the hour of blackness, every moment of physical gratification or sin adds its weight to the terrible burden which must be borne. This man felt that he was lost. Perhaps all hope was not quite dead. He called on all his courage to make a last attempt at escape. He must leave this place at once. He would go first to his house in Upper Berkeley Street, Lady Llwellyn's house! His wife. Something strange and long forgotten moved within him at that word. What might not his life have been by her side, a life lived in open honour! What had he done with it all? His great name, his fame, were built up slowly by his long and brilliant work. Yet all the time that fair edifice was being undermined by secret workers. The lusts of the flesh were deep below the structure, their hammers were always slowly tapping--and now it was all over. He drove up to his own door, unlocked it, and went up the stairs to his own rooms. Though he had not been near them for weeks, he saw--with how keen a pang of regret--that they were swept and tidy, ready for his coming at any time. He rang the bell. CHAPTER VIII DEATH COMING WITH ONE GRACE