His rough hand had closed on the delicate wings of a soul as a boy
crushes the butterfly he pursues. As Elsmere had stood looking back at
him from the library door, the suffering which spoke in every line of
that changed face had stirred a sudden troubled remorse in Roger
Wendover. It was mere justice that one result of that suffering should
be to leave himself forlorn.

He had been thinking and writing of religion, of the history of ideas,
all his life. Had he ever yet grasped the meaning of religion _to the
religious man_? _God_ and _faith_--what have these venerable ideas ever
mattered to him personally, except as the subjects of the most ingenious
analysis, the most delicate historical inductions? Not only sceptical to
the core, but constitutionally indifferent, the squire had always found
enough to make life amply worth living in the mere dissection of other
men's beliefs.

But to-night! The unexpected shock of feeling, mingled with the terrible
sense, periodically alive in him, of physical doom, seems to have
stripped from the thorny soul its outer defences of mental habit. He
sees once more the hideous spectacle of his father's death, his own
black half-remembered moments of warning, the teasing horror of his
sister's increasing weakness of brain. Life has been on the whole a
burden, though there has been a certain joy no doubt in the fierce
intellectual struggle of it. And to-night it seems so nearly over! A
cold prescience of death creeps over the squire as he sits in the
lamplit silence. His eye seems to be actually penetrating the eternal
vastness which lies about our life. He feels himself old, feeble, alone.
The awe, the terror which are at the root of all religions have fallen
even upon him at last.

The fire burns lower, the night wears on; outside, an airless, misty
moonlight lies over park and field. Hark! was that a sound upstairs, in
one of those silent empty rooms?

The squire half rises, one hand on his chair, his blanched face
strained, listening. Again! Is it a footstep or simply a delusion of the
ear? He rises, pushes aside the curtains into the inner library, where
the lamps have almost burnt away, creeps up the wooden stair, and into
the deserted upper story.

Why was that door into the end room--his father's room--open? He had
seen it closed that afternoon. No one had been there since. He stepped
nearer. Was that simply a gleam of moonlight on the polished
floor--confused lines of shadow