It was quite dark in Sir Robert's room. A faint yellow flicker came through the window, which was not curtained, from a gas lamp in the street. A dull and distant murmur from the Edgeware Road could be dimly heard, otherwise the room was quite silent. Llwellyn did not lie where he had fallen. His swoon had lasted long and no one had come to succour him. But the end was not just yet. The merciful oblivion of passing from a swoon into death was denied him. He had come to his senses late in the afternoon, about the time that the large party of people had emerged on foot and in carriages from the narrow _cul-de-sac_ of Downing Street. He had felt very cold, an icy-cold. There had come a terrible moment. The physical sensation was swamped and forgotten in one frightful flash of realisation. He was alone, the end was at hand. Alone. Instinctively he had tried to rise. He was lying face downwards at the return of sensation. His legs would not answer the message of his brain when he tried to move them so that he might rise. They lay like long dead cylinders behind him. He was able to drag himself very slowly, for a yard or two, until he reached an ottoman. He could not lift the vast weight of his body into the seat. It was utterly beyond his strength. He propped his trunk against the seat. It was all he was able to accomplish. Icy-cold sweat ran down his cheeks at the exertion. After he had finished moving he found that all strength had left him. He was paralysed from the waist downwards. The rest of his body was too weak to move him. Only his brain was working with a terrible activity, there alone in the chill dark. There came into his molten brain the impulse to pray. Deep down in every human heart that impulse lies. It is a seed planted there by God that it may grow into the tree of salvation. The effort was sub-conscious. Almost simultaneously with it came the awful remembrance of what he had done. A name danced in letters of flame in his brain--JUDAS. He looked round for some means to end this unbearable torture. He could see nothing, the room was very cold and dark, but he knew there was a case of razors on a table by the window. When he tried to move he found that he could not. The paralysis was growing upwards. Then this was to be the end? A momentary flood of relief came over him. His blood seemed warm again. But the sensation died rapidly away, the physical and mental glow alike. He remembered those cases, frequent enough, when the whole body loses the power of movement, but the brain survives, active, alive, helpless. And all the sweat which the physical glow had induced turned to little icicles all over his body, even as the thought froze in his brain. An hour went by. Alone in the dark. His tongue was parched and dry. A sudden wonder came to him--could he speak still? Without realising what word he used as a test he spoke. "Kate." A gaunt whisper in the silence.