Faithfully yours, JOSEPH WYBROW.

CHAPTER VI.

THE SADDEST OF ALL WORDS.

ON the tenth morning, dating from the dispatch of Father Benwell’s last letter to Rome, Penrose was writing in the study at Ten Acres Lodge, while Romayne sat at the other end of the room, looking listlessly at a blank sheet of paper, with the pen lying idle beside it.  On a sudden he rose, and, snatching up paper and pen, threw them irritably into the fire.

“Don’t trouble yourself to write any longer,” he said to Penrose.  “My dream is over.  Throw my manuscripts into the waste paper basket, and never speak to me of literary work again.”

“Every man devoted to literature has these fits of despondency,” Penrose answered.  “Don’t think of your work.  Send for your horse, and trust to fresh air and exercise to relieve your mind.”

Romayne barely listened.  He turned round at the fireplace and studied the reflection of his face in the glass.

“I look worse and worse,” he said thoughtfully to himself.

It was true.  His flesh had fallen away; his face had withered and whitened; he stooped like an old man.  The change for the worse had been steadily proceeding from the time when he left Vange Abbey.

“It’s useless to conceal it from me!” he burst out, turning toward Penrose.  “I believe I am in some way answerable—­though you all deny it—­for the French boy’s death.  Why not?  His voice is still in my ears, and the stain of his brother’s blood is on me.  I am under a spell!  Do you believe in the witches—­the merciless old women who made wax images of the people who injured them, and stuck pins in their mock likenesses, to register the slow wasting away of their victims day after day?  People disbelieve it in these times, but it has never been disproved.”  He stopped, looked at Penrose, and suddenly changed his tone.  “Arthur! what is the matter with you?  Have you had a bad night?  Has anything happened?”

For the first time in Romayne’s experience of him, Penrose answered evasively.

“Is there nothing to make me anxious,” he said, “when I hear you talk as you are talking now?  The poor French boy died of a fever.  Must I remind you again that he owed the happiest days of his life to you and your good wife?”

Romayne still looked at him without attending to what he said.

“Surely you don’t think I am deceiving you?” Penrose remonstrated.

“No; I was thinking of something else.  I was wondering whether I really know you as well as I thought I did.  Am I mistaken in supposing that you are not an ambitious man?”

“My only ambition is to lead a worthy life, and to be as useful to my fellow-creatures as I can.  Does that satisfy you?”

Romayne hesitated.  “It seems strange—­” he began.

“What seems strange?”

“I don’t say it seems strange that you should be a priest,” Romayne explained.  “I am only surprised that a man of your simple way of thinking should have attached himself to the Order of the Jesuits.”