“I have not changed it,” he replied, “I am Heliobas still.”  And his keen, steadfast, blue eyes rested half inquiringly, half compassionately, on the dark, weary, troubled face of his questioner who, avoiding his direct gaze, continued: 

“I should like to speak to you in private.  Can I do so now—­to-night—­at once?”

“By all means!” assented the monk, showing no surprise at the request.  “Follow me to the library, we shall be quite alone there.”

He led the way immediately out of the chapel, and through a stone-paved vestibule, where they were met by the two brethren who had first received and entertained the unknown guest, and who, not finding him in the refectory where they had left him, were now coming in search of him.  On seeing in whose company he was, however, they drew aside with a deep and reverential obeisance to the personage called Heliobas—­he, silently acknowledging it, passed on, closely attended by the stranger, till he reached a spacious, well-lighted apartment, the walls of which were entirely lined with books.  Here, entering and closing the door, he turned and confronted his visitor—­his tall, imposing figure in its trailing white garments calling to mind the picture of some saint or evangelist—­and with grave yet kindly courtesy, said: 

“Now, my friend, I am at your disposal!  In what way can Heliobas, who is dead to the world, serve one for whom surely as yet the world is everything?”

CHAPTER II.

Confession.

His question was not very promptly answered.  The stranger stood still, regarding him intently for two of three minutes with a look of peculiar pensiveness and abstraction, the heavy double fringe of his long dark lashes giving an almost drowsy pathos to his proud and earnest eyes.  Soon, however, this absorbed expression changed to one of sombre scorn.

“The world!” he said slowly and bitterly.  “You think I care for the world?  Then you read me wrongly at the very outset of our interview, and your once reputed skill as a Seer goes for naught!  To me the world is a graveyard full of dead, worm-eaten things, and its supposititious Creator, whom you have so be praised in your orisons to-night, is the Sexton who entombs, and the Ghoul who devours his own hapless Creation!  I myself am one of the tortured and dying, and I have sought you simply that you may trick me into a brief oblivion of my doom, and mock me with the mirage of a life that is not and can never be!  How can you serve me?  Give me a few hours’ respite from wretchedness! that is all I ask!”

As he spoke his face grew blanched and haggard, as though he suffered from some painfully repressed inward agony.  The monk Heliobas heard him with an air of attentive patience, but said nothing; he therefore, after waiting for a reply and receiving none, went on in colder and more even tones: 

“I dare say my words seem strange to you—­though they should not do so if, as reported, you have studied all the varying phases of that purely intellectual despair which, in this age of excessive over-culture, crushes men who learn too much and think too deeply.  But before going further I had better introduce myself.  My name is Alwyn ...”