shook hands, and, taking a chair to the window, where there was still
light enough to enable us to see each other's faces, he sat down beside
me, and, placing his hand upon my arm, with scarcely a word of preface
began his narrative.

CHAPTER VI

_How Mr. Jennings Met His Companion_

The faint glow of the west, the pomp of the then lonely woods of
Richmond, were before us, behind and about us the darkening room, and on
the stony face of the sufferer--for the character of his face, though
still gentle and sweet, was changed--rested that dim, odd glow which
seems to descend and produce, where it touches, lights, sudden though
faint, which are lost, almost without gradation, in darkness. The
silence, too, was utter: not a distant wheel, or bark, or whistle from
without; and within the depressing stillness of an invalid bachelor's
house.

I guessed well the nature, though not even vaguely the particulars of
the revelations I was about to receive, from that fixed face of
suffering that so oddly flushed stood out, like a portrait of
Schalken's, before its background of darkness.

"It began," he said, "on the 15th of October, three years and eleven
weeks ago, and two days--I keep very accurate count, for every day is
torment. If I leave anywhere a chasm in my narrative tell me.

"About four years ago I began a work, which had cost me very much
thought and reading. It was upon the religious metaphysics of the
ancients."

"I know," said I, "the actual religion of educated and thinking
paganism, quite apart from symbolic worship? A wide and very interesting
field."

"Yes, but not good for the mind--the Christian mind, I mean. Paganism is
all bound together in essential unity, and, with evil sympathy, their
religion involves their art, and both their manners, and the subject is
a degrading fascination and the Nemesis sure. God forgive me!

"I wrote a great deal; I wrote late at night. I was always thinking on
the subject, walking about, wherever I was, everywhere. It thoroughly
infected me. You are to remember that all the material ideas connected
with it were more or less of the beautiful, the subject itself
delightfully interesting, and I, then, without a care."

He sighed heavily.

"I believe, that every one who sets about writing in earnest does his
work, as a friend of mine phrased it, _on_ something--tea, or coffee, or
tobacco. I suppose there is a material waste that must be hourly
supplied in such