He paused once to toss away his cigar, but he did not look out again over the fair prospect of his lands.  He was looking at other things, seeing the vast emptiness of a life that had never been worth while stretching behind and before him.  Like a solitary traveller pausing in the heart of the desert, he stood to view the barrenness around him.

He had travelled far, had pursued many a quest with ardour; but the ardour had all gone out of him now.  Only the empty solitude remained.  He had 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.