lived a life of fevered variety, he had drunk deep of many waters;
but he had never been satisfied. And now it seemed to him that all he had
ever looked upon, all he had ever achieved, was mirage. Nothing of all
that he had ever striven for was left. The fruit had turned to ashes in
his mouth, and no spring remained whereat to quench his thirst.

Perhaps few men have ever realized the utter waste of wickedness as
Charles Rex realized it that night. He met it whichever way he turned. To
gratify the moment's whim had ever been his easy habit. If a generous
impulse had moved him, he had gratified that also. But it had never been
his way to sacrifice himself--until a certain night when a child had come
to him, wide-eyed and palpitating like a driven bird, and had sought
shelter and protection at his hands.

That, very curiously, had been the beginning of a new era in his life. It
had appealed to him as nothing had ever appealed before. He had never
tasted--or even desired--the Dead Sea fruit again. Something had entered
his being on that night which he had never been able to cast out, and all
other things had been dwarfed to insignificance.

He faced the fact as he paced his castle walls. The relish had gone out
of his life. He was gathering what he had sown, and the harvest was
barren indeed.

Time passed; he walked unheeding. If he spent the whole night on the
ramparts, there was no one to know or care. It was better than tossing
sleepless under a roof. He felt as if a roof would suffocate him. But
sheer physical weariness began to oppress even his elastic frame at last.
He awoke to the fact that he was dead tired.

He sat down in an embrasure between the battlements, and drifted into the
numb state between waking and sleeping in which visions are born. For a
space nothing happened, then quite suddenly, rising as it were out of
a void, a presence entered his consciousness, reached and touched his
spirit. Intangibly, but quite unmistakably, he was aware of the summons,
of a voice that spoke within his soul.

He lifted his head and looked about him. Emptiness, stark emptiness, was
all he saw. Yet, in a moment, as though a hand had beckoned, he arose.
Without a backward glance he traversed the distance that lay between
him and the turret-door. He went through it into utter darkness, and in
utter darkness began the descent.

A shaft of moonlight smote through a slit in the stone wall as he rounded
the corner of the st