o take Patricia for a
country drive in the little car. When the city was left behind, and the
small machine was purring steadily northwestward over a road which led
to nowhere in particular, Blount put his finger accurately upon the
thing which had been building little barriers of silence between them
all the way out from town.

"You knew me well enough yesterday to be reasonably certain of what I
would do in given circumstances, didn't you, Patricia?" he began
abruptly. "To-day you are not so sure about it. Why?"

She laughed lightly, but there was a serious undernote in her voice when
she said: "There are moments when you make me wonder if you haven't been
dabbling in necromancy, Evan. I was at that very instant telling myself
that it wasn't so."

"But you know it is so," he persisted. "Why am I different?"

"I don't know."

"Yet you recognize the fact?"

"Is it a fact?" she queried.

"Yes."

"In what way are you different?"

"I am not altogether certain that I know, myself. But I do know this:
between yesterday and to-day there is a gulf so wide that it seems
measureless. The scientists claim there are no cataclysms; no sudden and
sweeping changes taking place either in the physical or the metaphysical
field. If that be true, the changes must go on subconsciously for a long
time before they are recognized. There is no other way of accounting for
the gulfs."

"You are talking miles over my head," she protested; and, though the
assertion was not strictly true, it served its purpose.

"I can make it a little plainer," he went on, slowing the motor until
the small car was merely ambling. "You remember that night at Wartrace
Hall, and what you told me? I went out from that talk resolved to do
what you had shown me I ought to do, stubbornly refusing to consider the
possibility of failure. None the less, I have failed."

"Oh, no!" she exclaimed; "not that!"

"Yes, just that. But the failure is not the worst thing that has
befallen me. I have lost or gained something that pushes the yesterdays
into a past which can never be recovered. Let me tell you, girl: I have
been fighting in the open, against treachery and deceit fighting always
under cover. I have been fighting bare-handed where others were armed.
Day by day I have been finding out the baseness and the trickery; how my
own side has used me as a screen behind which the old dishonorable
expedients could be safely planned and carried out. I never knew un