fresh air and exercise to relieve your mind."

Romayne barely listened. He turned round at the fireplace and studied
the reflection of his face in the glass.

"I look worse and worse," he said thoughtfully to himself.

It was true. His flesh had fallen away; his face had withered and
whitened; he stooped like an old man. The change for the worse had been
steadily proceeding from the time when he left Vange Abbey.

"It's useless to conceal it from me!" he burst out, turning toward
Penrose. "I believe I am in some way answerable--though you all deny
it--for the French boy's death. Why not? His voice is still in my ears,
and the stain of his brother's blood is on me. I am under a spell! Do
you believe in the witches--the merciless old women who made wax images
of the people who injured them, and stuck pins in their mock likenesses,
to register the slow wasting away of their victims day after day? People
disbelieve it in these times, but it has never been disproved." He
stopped, looked at Penrose, and suddenly changed his tone. "Arthur!
what is the matter with you? Have you had a bad night? Has anything
happened?"

For the first time in Romayne's experience of him, Penrose answered
evasively.

"Is there nothing to make me anxious," he said, "when I hear you talk as
you are talking now? The poor French boy died of a fever. Must I remind
you again that he owed the happiest days of his life to you and your
good wife?"

Romayne still looked at him without attending to what he said.

"Surely you don't think I am deceiving you?" Penrose remonstrated.

"No; I was thinking of something else. I was wondering whether I really
know you as well as I thought I did. Am I mistaken in supposing that you
are not an ambitious man?"

"My only ambition is to lead a worthy life, and to be as useful to my
fellow-creatures as I can. Does that satisfy you?"

Romayne hesitated. "It seems strange--" he began.

"What seems strange?"

"I don't say it seems strange that you should be a priest," Romayne
explained. "I am only surprised that a man of your simple way of
thinking should have attached himself to the Order of the Jesuits."

"I can quite understand that," said Penrose. "But you should remember
that circumstances often influence a man in his choice of a vocation. It
has been so with me. I am a member of a Roman Catholic family. A Jesuit
College was near our place of abode, and a near relative of mine--since
dead--was one of t