ntly descending scale, until he either
capitulated or died. Neither prospect appealed to him. Night after night
was spent with his pipe and the unwinking stars, but he came no nearer
to a decision.

Finally he despaired of finding salvation in solitude, and went back to
the city. He established himself in a hotel, preferring to avoid friends
and relatives, few of whom, he felt, could possibly sympathise with him.

It is said that every criminal sooner or later visits the scene of his
crime. Some such spirit actuated Imrie. The day after his arrival in the
city was Sunday, and late in the morning, at an hour when he knew that
the congregation would be settling back in resignation preparatory to
the sermon, he strolled up to St. Viateur's.

But he did not enter. He preferred to stand across the street, and muse.
It was not a beautiful building. Squat, massive, in places heavily
ornate, in others dingily bare, it was a mere surface replica of
pristine architecture, at best, a caricature. It was a pretence even if
a candid one. It struck him with shocking force that its grim
insincerity was symbolic. Within its counterfeit solidity, wood and tin
masquerading as stone, machine-made carving strutting in fancied kinship
to the inspired craftsmanship of mediaeval ornament, dwelt a faith
equally false, equally dead. Superficially it had not changed through
the centuries: but the soul, the true life had gone from it. As the
building was but the grinning skull of art, so the faith within its
walls was but the dry and rattling bones of truth.

Those days in the changeless solitude of the forest, where the God in
the brown mists and the everlasting purple hills, was too near to be
worshipped, where Pan was more divine than Jehovah, had expanded Imrie's
soul more than he realised.

A veil he knew then, had covered his eyes. He had seen truth with
others' eyes. He had preached a truth which was his only by reflection.
Now, for the first time in his life, he was exultantly conscious of
seeing things with his own eyes.

St. Viateur's, which had once been so inspiring, was now only pitiful.
Even its successor, more vital as a work of art, would still house but a
ghost of truth.

He stared with a new wonder at the motor-cars, hurrying past, at a
wireless telegraph station in the distance, thrusting its antennae into
the illimitable skies. How could he have ever been so blind! In all the
world--and on it and over it--man was ever s