arliament is rotten enough already, you
shall not go there if I can help it. I am not so criminal as you
were in bargaining with crime. You made a squire give up his country
seat. I only ask you to give up your Parliamentary seat."

Sir Francis Verner sprang to his feet and looked about for one of
the bell ropes of the old-fashioned, curtained room.

"Where is Usher?" he cried, with a livid face.

"And who is Usher?" said Fisher, softly. "I wonder how much Usher
knows of the truth."

Verner's hand fell from the bell rope and, after standing for a
moment with rolling eyes, he strode abruptly from the room. Fisher
went but by the other door, by which he had entered, and, seeing no
sign of Usher, let himself out and betook himself again toward the
town.

That night he put an electric torch in his pocket and set out alone
in the darkness to add the last links to his argument. There was
much that he did not know yet; but he thought he knew where he could
find the knowledge. The night closed dark and stormy and the black
gap in the wall looked blacker than ever; the wood seemed to have
grown thicker and darker in a day. If the deserted lake with its
black woods and gray urns and images looked desolate even by
daylight, under the night and the growing storm it seemed still more
like the pool of Acheron in the land of lost souls. As he stepped
carefully along the jetty stones he seemed to be traveling farther
and farther into the abyss of night, and to have left behind him the
last points from which it would be possible to signal to the land of
the living. The lake seemed to have grown larger than a sea, but a
sea of black and slimy waters that slept with abominable serenity,
as if they had washed out the world. There was so much of this
nightmare sense of extension and expansion that he was strangely
surprised to come to his desert island so soon. But he knew it for a
place of inhuman silence and solitude; and he felt as if he had been
walking for years.

Nerving himself to a more normal mood, he paused under one of the
dark dragon trees that branched out above him, and, taking out his
torch, turned in the direction of the door at the back of the
temple. It was unbolted as before, and the thought stirred faintly
in him that it was slightly open, though only by a crack. The more
he thought of it, however, the more certain he grew that this was
but one of the common illusions of light coming from a different
angle. He