“Get out of here, Marcella, or look through the window a bit.  I’m going to get undressed and lock up all my things.  I’m a filthy object.  You mustn’t look at me till I’ve cleaned myself up.  Then you must see that I stay in bed till this hunger goes off.  If I do that every time it comes on—­Lord, you always make me feel I want to wash myself in something very big and clean, like the sea.”

She turned to the glimmering window, feeling very humble.  She felt that she had let him down, somehow, in not being more wise.  And yet she knew very certainly that she was going to grope and grope now, hurting herself and him until she did know.

“Why am I such a fool?” she asked, helplessly.  The Morse lights winked at her from the flagship and she got back the memory of a night many years ago, when she had walked on Ben Grief with her mother just before she was too ill to walk out any more.  They had seen a ship winking so that night, far out at sea, and it had passed silently.  That night her mother had talked of God’s Fools and how they were the world’s wisest men.

“If you are not very wise, darling,” her mother had said, “God has a chance to use you better.  It is so very hard for clever people to do things for God, humbly—­which is the only way—­because they are egotists wanting to show their own cleverness and not His all the time.”

That night she had told Marcella the story of Parsifal, the “pure fool” and how he, too big a fool to know his own name properly, had come to the court of the king who was too ill to do anything, God’s work or man’s.

“You see, this king had been given the sacred Spear.  So long as he had it no enemy could hurt him or his kingdom.  But when he forgot, and pleased himself just for a moment, the enemy got the Spear and wounded him with it.  No one could cure him till poor Parsifal came along—­a poor simpleton who had been brought up in the desert.  And the only reason he could win back the Spear, and cure the king, and bring back the symbol of God’s Presence on earth again, was that he was so sorry for the king.  He wanted so much to heal him that, whenever he got tired and sick, and whenever he got into temptations he was able to conquer them.  It was his pity made him conquer where wiser people, more selfish and less loving, had failed.”

Marcella let the far-off, gentle voice sink into her mind, then.  She saw herself very consciously as Parsifal; he, too, had been a fool.  She felt she could take heart of grace from the fact that another fool had won through to healing and victory.  When, presently, Louis’s voice came to her, she turned with a swift vision of him as King Amfortas with the unstaunchable wound.

He had washed and brushed his hair, and changed into pyjamas.  He looked very pitiful, very ill.  He was standing in the middle of the room with the two candles flicking in the light night breeze, making leaping shadows of him all over the walls.