en fields. Some trees started like spies
along the road. Overhead, where the mists were faint, the sky showed the
faintest of pale blue. The long road rang under Olva's step--it would be
a frosty night.

When the little wood was now a black ball in the mist Olva was suddenly
sick. He leant against one of the dark mysterious trees and was
wretchedly, horribly ill. Slowly, then, the colour came back to his
cheeks, his hands were once more steady, he could see again clearly. He
addressed the strange world about him, the long flat fields, the hard
white road, the orange sun. "That is the last time," he said aloud, "the
last weakness."

He definitely braced himself to face life. There would not be much of
it--to-morrow he would be arrested: meanwhile there should be no more of
these illusions. There was, for instance, the illusion that the body was
following him, bounding grotesquely along the hard road. He knew that
again and again he turned his head to see whether anything were there,
and the further the little wood was left behind the nearer did the body
seem to be. He must not allow himself to think these things. Carfax was
dead--Carfax was dead--Carfax was dead. It was a good thing that Carfax
was dead. He had saved, he hoped, Rose Midgett--that at any rate he had
done; it was a good thing for Rose Midgett that he had killed Carfax.
He had, incidentally, no interest on his own account in Rose Midgett--he
scarcely knew her by sight--but it was pleasant to think that she would
be no longer worried. . . .

Then there was that question about God. Now the river appeared, darkly,
dimly below the road, the reeds rising spire-like towards the faint blue
sky. That question about God--Olva had never believed in any kind of a
God. His father had defied God and the Devil time and again and had been
none the worse for it. And yet--here and there about the world people
lived and had their being to whom this question of God was a vital
question; people like Bunning and his crowd--mad, the whole lot of
them. Nevertheless there was something there that had great power. That
had, until to-day, been Olva's attitude, an amused superior curiosity.

Now it was a larger question. There had been that moment after Carfax
had fallen, a moment of intense silence, and in that moment something
had spoken to Olva. It is a fact as sure as concrete, as though he
himself could remember words and gesture. There had been Something
there. . . .

Bru