The morning of the twenty-ninth of October crept slowly and greyly through the windows of the sisters’ room. Linda had done her best to forget her own trouble and to offer what she could of consolation and hope to Nance. It was nearly three o’clock before the unhappy girl found forgetfulness in sleep, and now with the first gleam of light she was awake again.

The worst she could have anticipated was what had happened. Adrian had been taken away—not recognizing any one—to that very Asylum at Mundham which they had glanced at together with such ominous forebodings. She herself—what else could she do?—had been forced to sign her name to the official document which, before midnight fell upon Oakguard, made legal his removal.

She had signed it—she shuddered now to think of her feelings at that moment—below the name of Brand, who as a magistrate was officially compelled to take the initiative in the repulsive business. Dr. Raughty and Mr. Traherne, who had both been summoned to the house, had signed that dreadful paper, too. Nance’s first impression on regaining consciousness was that of the Doctor’s form bending anxiously over her. She remembered how queer his face looked in the shadowy candle-light and how gently he had stroked the back of her hand when she unclosed her eyes, and what relief his expression had shown when she whispered his name.

It was the Doctor who had driven her home at last, when the appalling business was over and the people had come, with a motor car from Mundham, and carried Adrian away. She had learnt from him that Brand’s injuries were in no way serious and were likely to leave no lasting hurt, beyond a deep scar on the forehead. His arms were bruised and injured, Fingal told her, but neither of them was actually broken.

Hamish Traherne had gone with the Mundham people to the Asylum and would spend the night there. He had promised Nance to come and see her before noon and tell her everything.

She gathered also from Fingal that Philippa, showing unusual promptitude and tact, had succeeded in keeping Mrs. Renshaw away, both from the closed door of the chapel and from the bedside of Brand, until the latter had recovered consciousness.

Nance, as her mind went over and over every detail of that hideous evening, could not help thanking God that Adrian had at least been spared the tragic burden of blood-guiltiness. As far as the law of the land was concerned, he had only to recover his sanity and regain his normal senses, to make his liberation easy and natural. There had been no suggestion in the paper she had signed—and she had been especially on the look-out for that—with regard to criminal lunacy.

She sat up in bed and looked at her sister. Linda was sleeping as peacefully as a child. The cold morning light gave her face a curious pallor. Her long brown lashes lay motionless upon her cheeks, and from her gently parted lips her breath came evenly and calmly.

Nance recalled the strange interview she had had with Brand before Adrian flung himself between them. It was strange! Do what she could, she could not feel towards that man anything but a deep unspeakable pity. Had he magnetized her—her too—she wondered—with that mysterious force in him, that force at once terrible and tender, which so many women had found fatal? No—no! That, of course, was ridiculous. That was unthinkable. Her heart was Adrian’s and Adrian’s alone. But why, then, was it that she found herself not only pardoning him what he had done but actually—in some inexplicable way—condoning it and understanding it? Was she, too, losing her wits? Was she, too,—under the influence of this disastrous place—forfeiting all sense of moral proportion?

The man had seduced her sister, and had refused—that remained quite clearly as the prevailing impression of that wild interview with him—definitely and obstinately to marry her, and yet, here was she, her sister’s only protector in the world, softening in her heart towards him and thinking of him with a sort of sentimental pity! Truly the minds of mortal men and women contained mysteries past finding out!

She lay back once more upon her pillows and let the hours of the morning flow over her head like softly murmuring waves. There is often, especially in a country town, something soothing and refreshing beyond words in the opening of an autumn day. In winter the light does not arrive till the stir and noise and traffic of the streets has already, so to speak, established itself. In summer the earlier hours are so long and bright, that by the time the first movements of humanity begin, the day has already been ravished of its pristine freshness and grown jaded and garish. Early mornings in spring have a magical and thrilling charm, but the very exuberance of joyous life then, the clamorous excitement of birds and animals, the feverish uneasiness and restlessness of human children, make it difficult to lie awake in perfect receptivity, drinking in every sound and letting oneself be rocked and lulled upon a languid tide of half-conscious dreaming.

Upon such a tide, however, Nance now lay, in spite of everything, and let the vague murmurs and the familiar sounds flow over her, in soft reiteration. That she should be able to lie like this, listening to the rattle of the milkman’s cans and the crying of the sea-gulls and the voices of newly-awakened bargemen higher up the river, and the lowing of cattle from the marshes and the chirping of sparrows on the roof, when all the while her lover was moaning, in horrible unconsciousness, within those unspeakable walls, was itself, as she contemplated it in cold blood, an atrocious trick of all-subverting Nature!

She looked at the misty sunlight, soft and mellow, which now began to invade the room, and she marvelled at herself in a sort of bewildered shame that she should not, at this crisis in her life, be able to feel more. Was it that her experiences of the day before had so harrowed her soul that she had no power of reaction left? Or was it—and upon this thought she tried to fix her mind as the true explanation—that the great underlying restorative forces were already dimly but powerfully exerting themselves on behalf of Adrian, and on behalf of her sister and herself?

She articulated the words “restorative forces” in the depths of her mind, giving her thought this palpable definition; but as she did so she was only too conscious of the presence of a mocking spirit there, whose finger pointed derisively at the words as soon as she had imaged them. Restorative forces? Were there such things in the world at all? Was it not much more likely that what she felt at this moment was nothing more than that sort of desperate calm which comes, with a kind of numbing inertia, upon human beings, when they have been wrought upon to the limit of their endurance? Was it not indeed rather a sign of her helplessness, a sign that she had come now to the end of all her powers, and could do no more than just stretch out her arms upon the tide and lie back upon the dark waters, letting them bear her whither they pleased—was it not rather a token of this, than of any inkling of possible help at hand?

It was at that moment that amid the various sounds which reached her ear, there came the clear joyous whistling of some boy apprentice, occupied in removing the shutters from one of the shop-windows in the street. The boy was whistling, casually and clumsily enough, but still with a beautiful intonation, certain familiar strophes from the Marseillaise. The great revolutionary tune echoed clear and strong over the drowsy cobble-stones, between the narrow patient walls, and down away towards the quiet harbour.

It was incredible the effect which this simple accident had upon the mind of the girl. In one moment she had flung to the winds all thought of submission to destiny—all idea of “lying back” upon fate. No longer did she dream vaguely and helplessly of “restorative forces,” somewhere, somehow, remotely active in her favour. The old, brave, defiant, youthful spirit in her, the spirit of her father’s child, leapt up, strong and vigorous in her heart and brain. No—no! Never would she yield. Never would she submit. “Allons, enfants!” She would fight to the end.

And then, all in a moment, she remembered Baptiste. Of course! That was the thing to be done. Fool that she was not to have thought of it before! She must send a cabled message to Adrian’s son. It was towards Baptiste that his spirit was continually turning. It must be Baptiste who should restore him to health!

It was not much after six o’clock when that boy’s whistling reached her, but between then and the first moment of the opening of the post office, her mind was in a whirl of hopeful thoughts.

As she stood waiting at the little stuccoed entrance for the door to open, and watched with an almost humorous interest the nervous expectancy of the most drooping, pallid, unhealthy and unfortunately complexioned youth she had ever set eyes upon, she felt full of strength and courage. Adrian had been ill before and had recovered. He would recover now! She herself would bring him the news of Baptiste’s coming. The mere news of it would help him.

There was a little garden just visible through some iron railings by the side of the post office and above these railings and drooping towards them so that it almost rested upon their spikes, was a fading sunflower. The flower was so wilted and tattered that Nance had no scruple about stretching her hand towards it and trying to pluck it from its stem. She did this half-mechanically, full of her new hope, as a child on its way to catch minnows in a freshly discovered brook might pluck a handful of clover.

The sickly-looking youth—Nance couldn’t help longing to cover his face with zinc-ointment; why did one always meet people with dreadful complexions in country post offices?—observing her efforts, extended his hand also, and together they pulled at the radiant derelict, until they broke it off. When she held it in her hands, Nance felt a little ashamed and sorry, for the tall mutilated stem stood up so stark and raw with drops of white frothy sap oozing from it. She could not help remembering how it was one of Adrian’s innocent superstitions to be reluctant to pick flowers. However, it was done now. But what should she do with this great globular orb of brown seeds with the scanty yellow petals, like weary taper-flames, surrounding its circumference?

The lanky youth looked at her and smiled shyly. She met his eyes, and observing his embarrassment, obviously tinged with unconcealed admiration, she smiled back at him, a sweet friendly smile of humorous camaraderie.

Apparently this was the first time in his life that a really beautiful girl had ever smiled at him, for he blushed a deep purple-red all over his face.

“I think, ma’am,” he stammered nervously, “I know who you are. I’ve seen you with Mr. Stork.”

Nance’s face clouded. She regarded it as a bad omen to hear this name mentioned. Her old mysterious terror of her friend’s friend rose powerfully upon her. In some vague obscure way, she felt conscious of his intimate association with all the forces in the world most inimical to her and to her future.

Observing her look and a little bewildered by it, the youth rambled helplessly on. “Mr. Stork has been a very good friend to me,” he murmured. “He got me my job at Mr. Walpole’s—Walpole the saddler, Miss. I should have had to have left mother if it hadn’t been for him.”

With a sudden impulse of girlish mischief, Nance placed in the boy’s hand the great faded flower she was holding. “Put it into your button-hole,” she said.

At that moment the door opened, and forgetting the boy, the sunflower, and the ambiguous Mr. Stork, she hurried into the building, full of her daring enterprise.

Her action seemed to remove from the youth’s thoughts whatever motive he may have had in waiting for the opening of the office. Perhaps this goddess-like apparition rendered commonplace and absurd some quaint pictorial communication, smudgy and blotched, which now remained unstamped in his coat-pocket. At any rate he slunk away, with long, furtive, slouching strides, carrying the flower she had given him as reverently as a religious-minded acolyte might carry a sacred vessel.

Meanwhile, Nance sent off her message, laying down on the counter her half-sovereign with a docility that thrilled the young woman who officiated there with awe and importance.

“Baptiste Sorio, fifteen West Eleventh Street, New York City,” the message ran, “come at once; your father in serious mental trouble”; and she signed it with her own name and address, and paid five shillings more to secure an immediate reply.

Then, leaving the post office, she returned slowly and thoughtfully to her lodging. The usual stir and movement of the beginning of the day’s work filled the little street when she approached her room. Nance could not help thinking how strange and curious it was that the stream of life should thus go rolling forward with its eternal repetition of little familiar usages, in spite of the desperation of this or the other cruel personal drama.

Adrian might be moaning for his son in that Mundham house. Linda might be fearing and dreading the results of her obsession. Philippa might be tossing forth her elfish laugh upon the wind among the oak-trees. She herself might be “lying back upon fate” or struggling to wrestle with fate. What mattered any of these things to the people who sold and bought and laughed and quarrelled and laboured and made love, as the powers set in motion a new day, and the brisk puppets of a human town began their diurnal dance?

It was not till late in the afternoon that Nance received an answer to her message. She was alone when she opened it, Linda having gone as usual, under her earnest persuasion, to practise in the church. The message was brief and satisfactory: “Sailing to-morrow Altrunia Liverpool six days boat Baptiste.”

So he would really be here—here in Rodmoor—in seven or eight days. This was news for Adrian, if he had the power left to understand anything! She folded the paper carefully and placed it in her purse.

Mr. Traherne had come to her about noon, bringing news that, on the whole, was entirely reassuring. It seemed that Sorio had done little else than sleep since his first entrance into the place; and both the doctors there regarded this as the best possible sign.

Hamish explained to her that there were three degrees of insanity—mania, melancholia, and dementia—and, from what he could learn from his conversations with the doctors, this heavy access of drowsiness ruled out of Adrian’s case the worst symptom of both these latter possibilities. What they called “mania,” he explained to her, was something quite curable and with nearly all the chances in favour of recovery. It was really—he told her he had gathered from them—“only a question of time.”

The priest had been careful to inquire as to the possibility of Nance being allowed to visit her betrothed; but neither of the doctors seemed to regard this, at any rate for the present, as at all desirable. He cordially congratulated her, however, on having sent for Sorio’s son. “Whatever happens,” he said, “it’s right and natural that he should be here with you.”

While Nance was thus engaged in “wrestling with fate,” a very different mental drama was being enacted behind the closed windows of Baltazar’s cottage.

Mr. Stork had not been permitted even to fall asleep before rumours reached him that some startling event had occurred at Oakguard. Long before midnight, by the simple method of dropping in at the bar of the Admiral’s Head, he had picked up sufficient information to make him decide against seeing any one that night. They had taken Sorio away, and Mr. Renshaw had escaped from a prolonged struggle with the demented man with the penalty of only a few bruises. Thus, with various imaginative interpolations which he discounted as soon as he heard them, Baltazar got from the gossips of the tavern a fair account of what had occurred.

There was, indeed, so much excitement in Rodmoor over the event that, for the first time in the memory of the oldest inhabitants, the Admiral’s Head remained open two whole hours after legal closing time. This was in part explained by the fact that the two representatives of the law in the little town had been summoned to Oakguard to be ready for any emergency.

It was now about four o’clock in the afternoon. Baltazar had found himself with little appetite for either breakfast or lunch, and at this moment, as he sat staring at a fireplace full of nothing but burnt out ashes, his eyes had such dark lines below them that one might have assumed that sleep as well as food had lost its savour for him in the last twelve hours. By his side on a little table stood an untasted glass of brandy, and at his feet in the fender lay innumerable, but in many cases only half-smoked, cigarettes.

The impression which was now upon him was that of being one of two human creatures left alive, those two alone, after some world-destroying plague. He had the feeling that he had only to go out into the street to come upon endless dead bodies strewn about, in fantastic and horrible attitudes of death, and in various stages of dissolution. It was his Adriano who alone was left alive. But he had done something to him—so that he could only hear his voice without being able to reach him.

“I must end this,” he said aloud; and then again, as if addressing another person, “We must put an end to this, mustn’t we, Tassar?”

He rose to his feet and surveyed himself in one of his numerous beautifully framed mirrors. He passed his slender fingers through his fair curls and peered into his own eyes, opening the lids wide and wrinkling his forehead. He smiled at himself then—a long strange wanton smile—and turned away, shrugging his shoulders.

Then he moved straight up to the picture of the Venetian Secretary and snapped his fingers at it. “You wait, you smirking ‘imp of fame’; you wait a little! We’ll show you that you’re not so deep or so subtle after all. You wait, Flambard, my boy, you wait a while; and we’ll show you plots and counter-plots!”

Then without a word he went upstairs to his bathroom. “By Jove!” he muttered to himself, “I begin to think Fingal’s right. The only place in this Christian world where one can possess one’s soul in peace is a tiled bathroom—only the tiles must be perfectly white,” he added, after a pause.

He made an elaborate and careful toilet, brushing his hair with exhaustive assiduity, and perfuming his hands and face. He dressed himself in spotlessly clean linen and put on a suit that had never been worn before. Even the shoes which he chose were elegant and new. He took several minutes deciding what tie to wear and finally selected one of a pale mauve colour. Then, with one final long and wistful glance at himself, he kissed the tips of his fingers at his own image, and stepped lightly down the stairs.

He paused for a moment in the little hall-way to select a cane from the stick rack. He took an ebony one at last, with an engraved silver knob bearing his own initials. There was something ghastly about the deliberation with which he did all this, but it was ghastliness wasted upon polished furniture and decrepit flies—unless every human house conceals invisible watchers. He hesitated a little between a Panama hat and one of some light-coloured cloth material, but finally selected the former, toying carefully with its flexible rim before placing it upon his head, and even when it was there giving it some final touches.

The absolute loneliness of the little house, broken only by an occasional voice from the tavern door, became, during his last moments there, a sort of passive accomplice to some nameless ritual. At length he opened the door and let himself out.

He walked deliberately and thoughtfully towards the park gates, and, passing in, made his way up the leaf-strewn avenue. Arrived at the house, he nodded in a friendly manner at the servant who opened the door, and asked to be taken to Mrs. Renshaw’s room. The man obeyed him respectfully, and went before him up the staircase and down the long echoing passage.

He found Mrs. Renshaw sewing at the half-open window. She put down her work when he entered and greeted him with one of those illumined smiles of hers, which Fingal Raughty was accustomed to say made him believe in the supernatural.

“Thank you for coming to see me,” she said, as he seated himself at her side, spreading around him an atmosphere of delicate odours. “Thank you, Baltazar, so much for coming.”

“Why do you always say that, Aunt Helen?” he murmured, almost crossly. It was one of the little long-established conventions between them that he should address his father’s wife in this way.

There came once more that indescribable spiritual light into her faded eyes. “Well,” she said gaily, “isn’t it kind of a young man, who has so many interests, to give up his time to an old woman like me?”

“Nonsense, nonsense, Aunt Helen!” he cried, with a rich caressing intonation, laying one of his slender hands tenderly upon hers. “It makes me absolutely angry with you when you talk like that!”

“But isn’t it true, Tassar?” she answered. “Isn’t this world meant for the young and happy?”

“As if I cared what the world was meant for!” he exclaimed. “It’s meant for nothing at all, I fancy. And the sooner it reaches what it was meant for and collapses altogether, the better for all of us!”

A look of distress that was painful to witness came into Mrs. Renshaw’s face. Her fingers tightened upon his hand and she leant forward towards him. “Tassar, Tassar, dear!” she said very gravely, “when you talk like that you make me feel as if I were absolutely alone in the world.”

“What do you mean, Aunt Helen?” murmured the young man in a low voice.

“You make me feel as if it were wrong of me to love you so much,” she went on, bending her head and looking down at his feet.

As he saw her now, with the fading afternoon light falling on her parted hair, still wavy and beautiful even in its grey shadows, and on her broad pale forehead, he realized once more what he alone perhaps, of all who ever had known her realized, the unusual and almost terrifying power of her personality. She forced him to think of some of the profound portraits of the sixteenth century, revealing with an insight and a passion, long since lost to art, the tragic possibilities of human souls.

He laughed gently. “Dear, dear Aunt Helen!” he cried, “forget my foolishness. I was only jesting. I don’t give a fig for any of my opinions on these things. To the deuce with them all, dear! To free you from one single moment of annoyance, I’d believe every word in the Church Catechism from ‘What is your name?’ down to ‘without doubt are lost eternally’!”

She looked up at this, and made a most heart-breaking effort not to smile. Her abnormally sensitive mouth—the mouth, as Baltazar always maintained, of a great tragic actress—quivered at the corners.

“If I had taught you your catechism,” she said, “you would remember it better than that!”

Baltazar’s eyes softened as he watched her, and a strange look, full of a pity that was as impersonal as the sea itself, rose to their surface. He lifted her hand to his lips.

“Don’t do that! You mustn’t do that!” she murmured, and then with another flicker of a smile, “you must keep those pretty manners, Tassar, for all your admiring young women!”

“Confound my young women!” cried the young man. “You’re far more beautiful, Aunt Helen, than all of them put together!”

“You make me think of that passage in ‘Hamlet,’” she rejoined, leaning back in her chair and resuming her work. “How does it go? ‘Man delights me not nor woman either—though by your smiling you seem to say so!’”

“Aunt Helen!” he cried earnestly, “I have something important to say to you. I want you to understand this. It’s sweet of you not to speak of Adriano’s illness. Any one but you would have condoled with me most horribly already!”

She raised her eyes from her sewing. “We must pray for him,” she said. “I have been praying for him all day—and all last night, too,” she added with a faint smile. “I let Philippa think I didn’t know what had happened. But I knew.” She shuddered a little. “I knew. I heard him in the ‘work-shop.’”

“What I wanted to say, Aunt Helen,” he went on, “was this. I want you to remember—whatever happens to either of us—that I love you more than any one in the world. Yes—yes,” he continued, not allowing her to interrupt, “better even than Adriano!”

A look resembling the effect of some actual physical pain came into her face. “You mustn’t say that, my dear,” she murmured. “You must keep your love for your wife when you marry. I don’t like to hear you say things like that—to an old woman.” She hesitated a moment. “It sounds like flattery, Tassar,” she added.

“But it’s true, Aunt Helen!” he repeated with almost passionate emphasis. “You’re by far the most beautiful and by far the most interesting woman I’ve ever met.”

Mrs. Renshaw drew her hand across her face. Then she laughed gaily like a young girl. “What would Philippa say,” she said, “if she heard you say that?”

Baltazar’s face clouded. He looked at her long and closely.

“Philippa is interesting and deep,” he said with a grave emphasis, “but she doesn’t understand me. You understand me, though you think it right to hide your knowledge even from yourself.”

Mrs. Renshaw’s face changed in a moment. It became haggard and obstinate. “We mustn’t talk any more about understanding and about love,” she said. “God’s will is that we should all of us only completely love and understand the person He leads us, in His wisdom, to marry.”

Baltazar burst into a fit of heathen laughter. “I thought you were going to end quite differently, Aunt Helen,” he said. “I thought the only person we were to love was going to be God. But it seems that it is man—or woman,” he added bitterly.

Mrs. Renshaw bent low over her work and the shadow grew still deeper upon her face. Seeing that he had really hurt her, Baltazar changed his tone.

“Dear Aunt Helen!” he whispered gently, “how many happy hours, how many, how many!—have we spent together reading in this room!”

She looked up quickly at this, with the old bright look. “Yes, it’s been a happy thing for me, Tassar, having you so near us. Do you remember how, last winter, we got through the whole of Sir Walter Scott? There’s no one nowadays like him—is there? Though Philippa tells me that Mr. Hardy is a great writer.”

“Mr. Hardy!” exclaimed her interlocutor whimsically. “I believe you would have come to him at last—perhaps you will, dear, some day. Let’s hope so! But I’m afraid I shall not be here then.”

“Don’t talk like that, Tassar,” she said without looking up from her work. “It will not be you who will leave me.”

There was a pause between them then, and Baltazar’s eyes wandered out into the hushed misty garden.

“Mr. Hardy does not believe in God,” he remarked.

“Tassar!” she cried reproachfully. “You know what you promised just now. You mustn’t tease me. No one deep down in his heart disbelieves in God. How can we? He makes His power felt among us every day.”

There was another long silence, broken only by the melancholy cawing of the rooks, beginning to gather in their autumnal roosting-places.

Presently Mrs. Renshaw looked up. “Do you remember,” she said very solemnly, “how you promised me one day never again to let Brand or Philippa speak disrespectfully of our English hymn-book? You said you thought the genius of some of our best-known poets was more expressed in their hymns than in their poetry. I have often thought of that.”

A very curious expression came into Baltazar’s face. He suddenly leaned forward. “Aunt Helen,” he said, “this illness of Adrian’s makes me feel, as you often say, how little security there is for any of our lives. I wish you’d say to me those peculiarly sad lines—you know the one I mean?—the one I used to make you smile over, when I was in a bad mood, by saying it always made me think of old women in a work-house! You know the one, don’t you?”

The whole complicated subtlety of Mrs. Renshaw’s character showed itself in her face now. She smiled almost playfully but at the same moment a supernatural light came in her eyes. “I know,” she said, and without a moment’s hesitation or the least touch of embarrassment, she began to sing, in a low plaintive melodious voice, the following well-known stanza. As she sang she beat time with her hand; and there came over her hearer the obscure vision of some old, wild, primordial religion, as different from paganism as it was different from Christianity, of which his mysterious friend was the votary and priestess. The words drifted away through the open window into the mist and the falling leaves.

When it was finished there was a strange silence in the room, and Baltazar rose to his feet. His face was pale. He moved to her side and, for the first and last time in their curious relations, he kissed her—a long kiss upon the forehead.

With a heightened colour in her cheeks and a nervous deprecatory smile on her lips, she went with him to the door. “Listen, dear,” she said, as she took his hand, “I want you to think of that poem of Cowper’s written when he was most despairing—the one that begins ‘God moves in a mysterious way.’ I want you to remember that though what he lays upon us seems crushing, there is always something behind it—infinite mercy behind infinite mystery.”

Baltazar looked her straight in the face. “I wonder,” he said, “whether it is I or you who is the most unhappy person in Rodmoor!”

She let his hand fall. “What we suffer,” she said, “seems to me like the weight of some great iron engine with jagged raw edges—like a battering-ram beating us against a dark mountain. It swings backwards and forwards, and it drives us on and on and on.”

“And yet you believe in God,” he whispered.

She smiled faintly. “Am I not alive and speaking to you, dear? If behind it all there wasn’t His will, who could endure to live another moment?”

They looked into one another’s face in silence. He made an attempt to say something else to her but his tongue refused to utter what his heart suggested.

“Good-bye, Aunt Helen,” he said.

“Good night, Tassar,” she answered, “and thank you for coming to see me.”

He left the house without meeting any one else and walked with a deliberate and rapid step towards the river. The twilight had already fallen, and a white mist coming up over the sand-dunes was slowly invading the marshes. The tide had just turned and the full-brimmed current of the river’s out-flowing poured swift and strong between the high mud-banks.

The Loon was at that moment emphasizing and asserting its identity with an exultant joy. It seemed almost to purr, with a kind of feline satisfaction, as its dark volume of brackish water rushed forward towards the sea. Whatever object it touched in its swift passage, it drew from it some sort of half-human sound—some whisper or murmur or protest of querulous complaining.

The reeds flapped; the pollard-roots creaked; the mud-promontories moaned; and all the while, with gurglings and suckings and lappings and deep-drawn, inward, self-complacent laughter, the sliding body of the slippery waters swept forward under its veil of mist.

On that night, of all nights, the Loon seemed to have reached that kind of emphasis of personality which things are permitted to attain—animate as well as inanimate—when their functional activity is at its highest and fullest.

And on that night, carefully divesting himself of his elegant clothes, and laying his hat and stick on the ground beside them, Baltazar Stork, without haste or violence, and with his brain supernaturally clear, drowned himself in the Loon.