The clock had been affixed to the study door both as an additional concealment, and possibly as a congenial sentry over the interior associations.  Since then the place had become the clergyman’s almost daily resort.  Pacing the contracted floor, sitting moodily in the chair,—­many a brooding hour had gone over his barrenly busy head, and written its darkening record in his book of life.  Here had been schemed that plan of revenge, whose insanity the insane schemer could not perceive.  Nor could he understand that mightier powers than he could master worked against him, and even used his efforts to bring forth contrary results.

But not all hours had passed so.  Spaces there had been wherein evil counsels had retired to a cloudy background, athwart which had brightened a rainbow, intangible, whose source was hidden, but whose colors were true before his eyes.  The grace and aerial beauty of sunshine lightened through the rain,—­the pleasing loveliness of essential life was projected on the gloom of evil imaginations.  For Manetho’s actual deeds were apt to be prompted by far gentler influences than governed his theories.  The man was better than his mind:  and goodness, perhaps, bears an absolute blessing; insomuch that the sinner, doing ignorant good, yet feels the benefit thereof; just as the rain, however dismal, cannot prevent the sun from making rainbows out of it.

On this particular morning Manetho sank into his deep-seated chair, and was quite still.  A great part of what had hitherto made his daily life ended here.  The activity of existence was over for him.  Thought, feeling, hope, could live hereafter only as phantoms of memory.  But to look back on evil done is not so pleasant as to plan it; the dead body of a foe moves us in another way than his living hostile person.

When, therefore, Manetho should have hurled to its mark the long-poised spear, he would have little to look forward to.  That one moment of triumph must repay, both for what had been and was to come.  To-day of all his days, then, must each sense and faculty be in exquisite condition.  Unseasonably enough, however, he found himself in a perversely dull and callous state.  Could Providence so cajole him as to mar the only joyful hour of his life!  Then better off than he were savages, who could destroy their recusant idols.  But nothing short of spiritual suicide would have destroyed the idol of Manetho!

He was wearing to-day the same priestly robe which he had put on when, for the first and last time, he performed a ministerial duty.  In this robe had he married Helen to Thor.  Itself a precious relic of antiquity, it had once dignified the shoulders of a contemporary of Manetho’s remotest ancestors.  Old Hiero Glyphic had counted it amongst his chiefest treasures; and on his sister’s wedding-day had produced it from its repository, insisting that the minister should wear it instead of the orthodox sacerdotal costume.  Since then it had lain untouched till to-day.