"Perhaps that will satisfy you," snarled Bellingham, with hate and fear
in his little grey eyes as he glanced back at his tormentor.

"No; I must make a clean sweep of all your materials. We must have no
more devil's tricks. In with all these leaves! They may have something
to do with it."

"And what now?" asked Bellingham, when the leaves also had been added to
the blaze.

"Now the roll of papyrus which you had on the table that night. It is in
that drawer, I think."

"No, no," shouted Bellingham. "Don't burn that! Why, man, you don't know
what you do. It is unique; it contains wisdom which is nowhere else to
be found."

"Out with it!"

"But look here, Smith, you can't really mean it. I'll share the
knowledge with you. I'll teach you all that is in it. Or, stay, let me
only copy it before you burn it!"

Smith stepped forward and turned the key in the drawer. Taking out the
yellow, curled roll of paper, he threw it into the fire, and pressed it
down with his heel. Bellingham screamed, and grabbed at it; but Smith
pushed him back and stood over it until it was reduced to a formless
grey ash.

"Now, Master B.," said he, "I think I have pretty well drawn your teeth.
You'll hear from me again, if you return to your old tricks. And now
good-morning, for I must go back to my studies."

And such is the narrative of Abercrombie Smith as to the singular events
which occurred in Old College, Oxford, in the spring of '84. As
Bellingham left the university immediately afterwards, and was last
heard of in the Soudan, there is no one who can contradict his
statement. But the wisdom of men is small, and the ways of Nature are
strange, and who shall put a bound to the dark things which may be found
by those who seek for them?

XI

"DE PROFUNDIS"

So long as the oceans are the ligaments which bind together the great
broadcast British Empire, so long will there be a dash of romance in our
minds. For the soul is swayed by the waters, as the waters are by the
moon, and when the great highways of an empire are along such roads as
these, so full of strange sights and sounds, with danger ever running
like a hedge on either side of the course, it is a dull mind indeed
which does not bear away with it some trace of such a passage. And now,
Britain lies far beyond herself, for the three-mile limit of every
seaboard is her frontier, which has been won by hammer and loom and pick
rather than by arts of war. For it is wr