copies were out. If the book was to be bought it had better be
bought at once. He left his office earlier than usual and turned in at
the first book-shop on his way to the train. The show-window was stacked
with conspicuously lettered volumes. "Margaret Aubyn" flashed back
at him in endless repetition. He plunged into the shop and came on a
counter where the name reiterated itself on row after row of bindings.
It seemed to have driven the rest of literature to the back shelves. He
caught up a copy, tossing the money to an astonished clerk who pursued
him to the door with the unheeded offer to wrap up the volumes.

In the street he was seized with a sudden apprehension. What if he were
to meet Flamel? The thought was intolerable. He called a cab and drove
straight to the station where, amid the palm-leaf fans of a perspiring
crowd, he waited a long half-hour for his train to start.

He had thrust a volume in either pocket and in the train he dared not
draw them out; but the detested words leaped at him from the folds of
the evening paper. The air seemed full of Margaret Aubyn's name. The
motion of the train set it dancing up and down on the page of a magazine
that a man in front of him was reading....

At the door he was told that Mrs. Glennard was still out, and he went
upstairs to his room and dragged the books from his pocket. They lay
on the table before him like live things that he feared to touch.... At
length he opened the first volume. A familiar letter sprang out at
him, each word quickened by its glaring garb of type. The little broken
phrases fled across the page like wounded animals in the open.... It was
a horrible sight.... A battue of helpless things driven savagely out of
shelter. He had not known it would be like this....

He understood now that, at the moment of selling the letters, he had
viewed the transaction solely as it affected himself: as an unfortunate
blemish on an otherwise presentable record. He had scarcely considered
the act in relation to Margaret Aubyn; for death, if it hallows,
also makes innocuous. Glennard's God was a god of the living, of the
immediate, the actual, the tangible; all his days he had lived in the
presence of that god, heedless of the divinities who, below the surface
of our deeds and passions, silently forge the fatal weapons of the dead.

VII

A knock roused him and looking up he saw his wife. He met her glance in
silence, and she faltered out, "Are you il