id of a walking-stick; and as time went on, the tonic effect of
Margate air, aiding the remedies prescribed by the surgeon, worked
such a change in me that I was pronounced well, and the doctor said I
might return home. I returned to Raxton a cripple no longer.

I returned cured. I say. But how entangled is this web of our life!
How almost impossible is it that good should come unmixed with evil,
or evil unmixed with good! At Margate, where the bracing air did
more, I doubt not, towards my restoration to health than all the
medicines,--at Margate my brother drank in his death-poison.

During the very last days of our stay he caught scarlet fever. In a
fortnight he was dead. The shock to me was very severe. It laid my
mother prostrate for months.

I was now by the death of Frank the representative of our branch of
the family, and a little fellow of uncomfortable importance. My uncle
Aylwin of Alvanley. being childless, was certain to leave me his
large estates, for he had dropped entirely away from the Aylwins of
Rington Manor, and also from the branch of the Aylwin family
represented by my kinsman Cyril.

II

THE MOONLIGHT CROSS OF THE GNOSTICS

I

My mother had some prejudice against a public school, and I was sent
to a large and important private one at Cambridge.

And go, with Winifred on my mind, I went one damp winter's morning to
Dullingham, our nearest railway station, on my way to Cambridge.

As concerns my school-days, I feel that all that will interest the
reader is this: as I rode through mile upon mile of the flat,
wide-stretching country, I made to myself a vow in connection with
Winifred,--a vow that when I left school I would do a certain thing
in relation to her, though Fate itself should say, 'This thing shall
not be done.' I did not know then, as I know now, how weak is human
will enmeshed in that web of Circumstance that has been a-weaving
since the beginning of the world.

I left school without the slightest notion as to what my future
course in life was to be. I was to take my rich uncle's property.
That was understood now. And although my mother never talked of the
matter, I could see in the pensive gaze she bent on me an
ever-present consciousness of a future for me more golden still.

But now I formed a new intimacy, and one of a very singular kind--an
intimacy with my father, who suddenly woke up to the fact that I was
no longer a child. It occurred on my making some pertinen