have delayed, will now fall on your own
head. Do not think to escape. The world itself would not be wide
enough to hide you. At the moment when you least expect it, your call
will come--"

Lessing stood, staring at the written words, and the little room seemed
suddenly cold as a cave. He had wished, and his wish had been granted
to him. Henceforth, till he died, danger must be his bride!

A man may be brave to the superlative of bravery, yet almost inevitably
he will weaken at the consciousness of hidden danger, pursuing him
stealthily day after day, week after week, playing with him with
ruthless deliberation, as a cat plays with a mouse, setting him free,
only to realise that his torture has been in vain, and the day of
reckoning is still to come.

For the first few days after his receipt of the fateful letter, Lessing
went about his work with a grim, but not altogether unpleasant,
excitement. He realised once for all that it was hopeless to try to
hide himself from the Brethren, but he determined to sell his life
dearly. He carried a policeman's whistle, and a walking-stick with a
large and roughly-cut head, which on occasion could be a formidable
weapon. The question of a revolver had been dismissed after the
shortest hesitation, seeing that Lessing's inexperience with firearms
made such a possession rather an extra danger than a protection. He put
his affairs in order, and, like every other man under sentence of death,
woke to a smarting consciousness of the sweetness of life. Life and--
Delia! Delia of the rose bloom and the misty eyes. Delia, who on
occasion could be so maddeningly, tantalisingly alive! Lessing did not
realise his own changed looks, and it seemed to him the cruellest
contrariety of fate that Delia should show herself at her sweetest and
most womanly at this moment when he knew himself separated from her by
the most impenetrable of barriers.

A fortnight of incessant, imminent anxiety passed slowly by; then came a
night when, taking his way to the corner house after dinner, Lessing
experienced his first tangible alarm. The square was empty of
pedestrians; he was walking on the farther side, close to the tall
shuttered houses, when through the shrubs behind the railing of the
centre enclosure, the lamplight showed a glimpse of a white face peering
towards him. The next second it had disappeared, but even as he walked
he had a conviction that a crouching figure kept pace beh