a representative of the
century. He thought how much better he would have done in another
age, and how out of sympathy he was with the utilitarian dullness of
the present time; how much more brilliant he would have been had he
lived at any other period of the Temple's history. Then he stopped to
study the style of the old staircase, the rough woodwork twisting up
the wall so narrowly, the great banisters full of shadow lighted by
the flickering lanterns. The yellowing colonnade--its beams and
overhanging fronts were also full of suggestion, and the suggestion
of old time was enforced by the sign-board of a wig-maker.

"The last of an ancient industry," thought Mike. "The wig is
representative of the seventeenth as the silk hat is of the
nineteenth century. I wonder why I am so strongly fascinated with the
seventeenth century?--I, a peasant; atavism, I suppose; my family
were not always peasants."

Turning from the old Latin inscription he viewed the church, so
evocative in its fortress form of an earlier and more romantic
century. The clocks were striking one, two hours would bring the dawn
close again upon the verge of the world. Mike trembled and thought
how he might escape. The beauty of the cone of the church was
outlined upon the sky, and he dreamed, as he walked round the
shadow-filled porch, full of figures in prayer and figures holding
scrolls, of the white-robed knights, their red crosses, their long
swords, and their banner called Beauseant. He dreamed himself Grand
Master of the Order; saw himself in chain armour charging the
Saracen. The story of the terrible idol with the golden eyes, the
secret rites, the knight led from the penitential cell and buried at
daybreak, the execution of the Grand Master at the stake, turned in
his head fitfully; cloud-shapes that passed, floating, changing
incessantly, suddenly disappearing, leaving him again Mike Fletcher,
a strained, agonized soul of our time, haunted and hunted by an idea,
overpowered by an idea as a wolf by a hound.

His life had been from the first a series of attempts to escape from
the idea. His loves, his poetry, his restlessness were all derivative
from this one idea. Among those whose brain plays a part in their
existence there is a life idea, and this idea governs them and leads
them to a certain and predestined end; and all struggles with it are
delusions. A life idea in the higher classes of mind, a life instinct
in the lower. It were almost i