he lips, and with eyes--such
sad eyes of reproach! Then I thought I was not fit to live, and I tried
to kill myself. They saved me, and brought me here."

"Yes; and now, Hubert?"

"Now," he said, "I am so happy. God surely placed me here where I cannot
sin. The days pass and the nights, and they are stainless. And he--he
comes by night and blesses me. I live for him now, and see always the
grey walls of his monastery, his face which shall, at last, be
completely mine."

* * * * *

"Good-bye," the doctor said to me as I got into the carriage to drive
back to the station. "Yes, he is perfectly happy, happier in his mania,
I believe, than you or I in our sanity."

I drove away from that huge home of madness, set in the midst of lovely
gardens in a smiling landscape, and I pondered those last words of the
doctor's:--

"You and I--in our sanity."

And, thinking of the peace that lay on Hubert's face, I compared the
so-called mad of the world with the so-called sane--and wondered.

THE MAN WHO INTERVENED

I

The atmosphere of the room in which Sergius Blake was sitting seemed to
him strange and cold. As he looked round it, he could imagine that a
light mist invaded it stealthily, like miasma rising from some sinister
marsh. There was surely a cloud about the electric light that gleamed in
the ceiling, a cloud sweeping in feathery, white flakes across the faces
of the pictures upon the wall. Even the familiar furniture seemed to
loom out faintly, with a gaunt and grotesque aspect, from shadows less
real, yet more fearful, than any living form could be.

Sergius stared round him slowly, pressing his strong lips together. When
he concentrated his gaze upon any one thing--a table, a sofa, a
chair--the cloud faded, and the object stood out clearly before his
eyes. Yet always the rest of the room seemed to lie in mist and in
shadows. He knew that this dim atmosphere did not really exist, that it
was projected by his mind. Yet it troubled him, and added a dull horror
to his thoughts, which moved again and again, in persistent promenade,
round one idea.

The hour was seven o'clock of an autumn night. Darkness lay over
London, and rain made a furtive music on roofs and pavements. Sergius
Blake listened to the drops upon the panes of his windows. They seemed
to beckon him forth, to tell him that it was time to exchange thought
for action. He had come to a definite and tremendous re