We went the rounds slowly and reverently; and then, when I supposed our inspection was over, and was turning to take my leave, he opened a door I had not noticed, and showed me into a slit of a room beyond. It was a mere monastic cell, scarcely large enough for his narrow iron bed and the chest which probably held his few clothes; but there, in a niche of the bare wall, facing the foot of the bed—there stood the Daunt Diana.

I gasped at the sight and turned to him; and he looked back at me without speaking.

“In the name of magic, Neave, how did you do it?”

He smiled as if from the depths of some secret rapture. “Call it magic, if you like; but I ruined myself doing it,” he said.

I stared at him in silence, breathless with the madness and the wonder of it; and suddenly, red to the ears, he flung out his boyish confession. “I lied to you that day in London—the day I said I didn’t care for her. I always cared—always worshipped—always wanted her. But she wasn’t mine then, and I knew it, and she knew it ... and now at last we understand each other.” He looked at me shyly, and then glanced about the bare cold cell. “The setting isn’t worthy of her, I know; she was meant for glories I can’t give her; but beautiful things, my dear Finney, like beautiful spirits, live in houses not made with hands...”

His face shone with extraordinary sweetness as he spoke; and I saw he’d got hold of the secret we’re all after. No, the setting isn’t worthy of her, if you like. The rooms are as shabby and mean as those we used to see him in years ago over the wine shop. I’m not sure they’re not shabbier and meaner. But she rules there at last, she shines and hovers there above him, and there at night, I doubt not, steals down from her cloud to give him the Latmian kiss.

THE DEBT

I

YOU remember—it’s not so long ago—the talk there was about Dredge’s “Arrival of the Fittest”? The talk has subsided, but the book of course remains: stands up, in fact, as the tallest thing of its kind since—well, I’d almost said since “The Origin of Species.”

I’m not wrong, at any rate, in calling it the most important contribution yet made to the development of the Darwinian theory, or rather to the solution of the awkward problem about which that theory has had to make such a circuit. Dredge’s hypothesis will be contested, may one day be disproved; but at least it has swept out of the way all previous conjectures, including of course Lanfear’s magnificent attempt; and for our generation of scientific investigators it will serve as the first safe bridge across a murderous black whirlpool.

It’s all very interesting—there are few things more stirring to the imagination than that sudden projection of the new hypothesis, light as a cobweb and strong as steel, across the intellectual abyss; but, for an idle observer of human motives, the other, the personal, side of Dredge’s case is even more interesting and arresting.