Quite well I remember Scotland now—­the sweetest, gentle soul he was, with a passion for cats, and Sappho, and the Anthology, very short in stature, with a Roman nose, continually making the effort to keep his neck straight, and draw his paunch in.  He used to say that the universe was being frantically contended for by two Powers:  a White and a Black; that the White was the stronger, but did not find the conditions on our particular planet very favourable to his success; that he had got the best of it up to the Middle Ages in Europe, but since then had been slowly and stubbornly giving way before the Black; and that finally the Black would win—­not everywhere perhaps, but here—­and would carry off, if no other earth, at least this one, for his prize.

This was Scotland’s doctrine, which he never tired of repeating; and while others heard him with mere toleration, little could they divine with what agony of inward interest, I, cynically smiling there, drank in his words.  Most profound, most profound, was the impression they made upon me.

* * * * *

But I was saying that when Clark left me, I was drawing on my gloves to go to see my fiancee, the Countess Clodagh, when I heard the two voices most clearly.

Sometimes the urgency of one or other impulse is so overpowering, that there is no resisting it:  and it was so then with the one that bid me go.

I had to traverse the distance between Harley Street and Hanover Square, and all the time it was as though something shouted at my physical ear:  ‘Since you go, breathe no word of the Boreal, and Clark’s visit’; and another shout:  ‘Tell, tell, hide nothing!’

It seemed to last a month:  yet it was only some minutes before I was in Hanover Square, and Clodagh in my arms.

She was, in my opinion, the most superb of creatures, Clodagh—­that haughty neck which seemed always scorning something just behind her left shoulder.  Superb! but ah—­I know it now—­a godless woman, Clodagh, a bitter heart.

Clodagh once confessed to me that her favourite character in history was Lucrezia Borgia, and when she saw my horror, immediately added:  ’Well, no, I am only joking!’ Such was her duplicity:  for I see now that she lived in the constant effort to hide her heinous heart from me.  Yet, now I think of it, how completely did Clodagh enthral me!

Our proposed marriage was opposed by both my family and hers:  by mine, because her father and grandfather had died in lunatic asylums; and by hers, because, forsooth, I was neither a rich nor a noble match.  A sister of hers, much older than herself, had married a common country doctor, Peters of Taunton, and this so-called mesalliance made the so-called mesalliance with me doubly detestable in the eyes of her relatives.  But Clodagh’s extraordinary passion for me was to be stemmed neither by their threats nor prayers.  What a flame, after all, was Clodagh!  Sometimes she frightened me.