and feeling self-righteous in the best room in a poor tenement.  Or to help some cause or other, which always means bundling people out of crooked houses, in which they’ve always lived, into straight houses, in which they often die.  And all the time you have inside only the horrid irony of your own empty head and empty heart.  I am to give to the unfortunate, when my whole misfortune is that I have nothing to give.  I am to teach, when I believe nothing at all that I was taught.  I am to save the children from death, and I am not even certain that I should not be better dead.  I suppose if I actually saw a child drowning I should save it.  But that would be from the same motive from which I have saved you, or destroyed you, whichever it is that I have done.”

“What was the motive?” asked Evan, in a low voice.

“My motive is too big for my mind,” answered the girl.

Then, after a pause, as she stared with a rising colour at the glittering sea, she said:  “It can’t be described, and yet I am trying to describe it.  It seems to me not only that I am unhappy, but that there is no way of being happy.  Father is not happy, though he is a Member of Parliament——­” She paused a moment and added with a ghost of a smile:  “Nor Aunt Mabel, though a man from India has told her the secret of all creeds.  But I may be wrong; there may be a way out.  And for one stark, insane second, I felt that, after all, you had got the way out and that was why the world hated you.  You see, if there were a way out, it would be sure to be something that looked very queer.”

Evan put his hand to his forehead and began stumblingly:  “Yes, I suppose we do seem——­”

“Oh, yes, you look queer enough,” she said, with ringing sincerity.  “You’ll be all the better for a wash and brush up.”

“You forget our business, madam,” said Evan, in a shaking voice; “we have no concern but to kill each other.”

“Well, I shouldn’t be killed looking like that if I were you,” she replied, with inhuman honesty.

Evan stood and rolled his eyes in masculine bewilderment.  Then came the final change in this Proteus, and she put out both her hands for an instant and said in a low tone on which he lived for days and nights: 

“Don’t you understand that I did not dare to stop you?  What you are doing is so mad that it may be quite true.  Somehow one can never really manage to be an atheist.”

Turnbull stood staring at the sea; but his shoulders showed that he heard, and after one minute he turned his head.  But the girl had only brushed Evan’s hand with hers and had fled up the dark alley by the lodge gate.