e the grim, cold dawn of early
spring-time, which even the birds do not brighten with their babble.

Silently staring into the fire, he vouchsafed no further explanations,
and I did not venture to ask for any; but I doubt if even such language
as he could command would have been so full of horrible suggestion as
that grey set face, and the terror-stricken gaze, which the growing
light made every minute more distinct, more weird. What had so suddenly
and so completely overthrown, not his own strength merely, but the
defences of his faith? He groped amongst them still, for, from time to
time, I heard him murmuring to himself familiar verses of prayer and
psalm and gospel, as if he sought therewith to banish some haunting
fear, to quiet some torturing suspicion. And at last, when the dull grey
day had fully broken, he turned towards me, and cried in tones more
heart-piercing than ever startled the great congregations in church or
cathedral--

"What if it were all a delusion, and there be no Father, no Saviour?"

And the horror of that abyss into which he looked, flashing from his
mind to my own, left me silent and helpless before him. Yet I longed to
give him comfort; for, with the regal self-possession which had fallen
from him, there had slipped from me too some undefined instinct of
distrust and disapproval. All that I felt now was the sad tie of
brotherhood which united us, poor human atoms, strong only in our
capacity to suffer, tossed and driven, whitherward we knew not, in the
purposeless play of soulless and unpitying forces.

CHAPTER V

AUSTYN'S GOSPEL

"He did not see the ghost, you say; he only felt it? I should think he
did--on his chest. I never heard of a clearer case of nightmare. You
must be careful whom you tell the story to, old chap; for at the first
go-off it sounds as if it was not merely eating too much that was the
matter. It was, however, indigestion sure enough. No wonder! If a man of
his age who takes no exercise will eat three square meals a day, what
else can he expect? And Mallet is rather liberal with her cream."

Atherley it was, of course, who propounded this simple interpretation of
the night's alarms, as he sat in his smoking-room reviewing his
trout-flies after an early breakfast we had taken with the Canon.

"You always account for the mechanism, but not for the effect. Why
should indigestion take that mental form?"

"Why, because indigestion constantly does in sleep, a