alls of the castle
he had built, and fondly believed to be a work of Cyclopean masonry, had
come tumbling about his ears, and lo! the huge blocks were only bits of
painted card, and the Lady of the Castle, his true love, was the false
Queen, after all. He folded up the letter and put it away in his
pocket-book, and went over to the mantel-glass and looked steadily at the
reflection of his own square face, haggard and drawn and ghastly, with
eyes of startling blue flaring out from under a scowling smudge of meeting
black eyebrows. He laughed harshly, and a mocking devil looked out of
those desperate eyes, and laughed back. He unlocked an oak-carved,
silver-mounted cellaret, and got out a decanter of brandy, and filled a
tumbler, and drank the liquor off. It numbed the unbearable mental agony,
though it had apparently no other effect. But probably he was drunk when
he rang the bell and said quietly to his man:

"Tait, do you believe there is a God?"

Tait's smooth, waxy countenance did not easily express surprise. He
answered, as though the question had been the most commonplace and
ordinary of queries:

"Can't say I do, sir. I reckon the parsons are responsible for floating
'Im, and that they made a precious good thing out of bearin' stock in
Heaven until the purchasers began to ask for delivery, and after that...."
He chuckled dryly. "I've lived with one or two of 'em, and, if I may say
so, sir--I know the breed!"

"He knows ... the breed ..." repeated Saxham heavily.

He asked another question, in the same thick, hesitating way, as he moved
across the carpet to the oak-and-silver cellaret.

"Tait, when things went damned badly with you, when that other man let you
in for the bill you backed for him, and that girl you were to have married
went off with someone else, what did you do to keep yourself from
brooding? Because you must have done something, man, as you're alive
to-day!"

Tait looked at his master dubiously as he poured out more brandy, and went
over and stood upon the hearthrug with his back to the empty fireplace,
drinking it in gulps. "I did what you're doing now, sir: I took a sight of
drink to keep the trouble down. And----" He hesitated.

"Go on," said Saxham, nodding over the tumbler.

"You're not like other gentlemen in your ways, sir," said smooth Tait,
"and that makes me 'esitate in saying it. But I took on a gay, agreeable
young woman of the free-and-easy sort, and went in for a bit o' plea