ng the little
voice. "I can give you Forgetfulness. I can bring you Death. Not that
death of the body which, for all you know, may mean a keener, more perfect
capability to live and suffer on the part of the Soul, stripped from the
earthly husk that has burdened and deadened it. The Death that is Death in
Life.... Here am I, ready to be your minister. Drink deep, and die!"

The man who heard lifted his white, wild, desperate face. The song came
more clearly.

"Wronged, outraged, betrayed of the God you blindly believed in and the
man and the woman who had your passionate love, your absolute faith, have
your revenge upon the One--as upon those two others. Degrade, cast down,
deface, the image of your Maker in you. Hurl back every gift of His,
prostitute and debase every faculty. Cease to believe, denying His Being
with the Will He forged and freed. Your Body, is it not your own, to do
with as you choose? Your Soul, is it not your helpless prisoner, while you
keep it in its cage of clay? Revenge, revenge, through the body and the
soul, upon Him who has mocked you! Do you not hear Him laugh as you sit
there desolate in the darkness--poor, broken reed that thought itself an
oak of might--alone, while your brother kisses the sweet lips that were
yours. David and Mildred are laughing too, at you. Hasten to efface every
memory of the lying kisses she has given you upon the bosoms of the
Daughters of Pleasure! Love, revel, drink! Drink, I say, and you will be
able to laugh at the One and the two...."

The little hissing voice drove Saxham mad. He leaped up, frenzied,
oversetting the chair. He tore open and threw wide the doors of the
oak-and-silver cellaret, and sought in it with shaking hands. He found a
bottle of champagne and the brandy-decanter, and a long tumbler, and
knocked off the wired neck of the bottle against the chimneypiece, and
crashed the foaming wine into the crystal, and filled up the glass with
brandy, and tossed off the stinging, bubbling, hissing mixture, and
laughed as he set the tumbler down.

The thing inside the oak-and-silver cellaret laughed too.

* * * * *

The hall-door shut heavily as Tait and the women in the kitchen sat and
listened. They had not spoken since the crash of the falling chair in the
room overhead. The area-door was open to the hot, sickly night air of
London in midsummer. Tait slid noiselessly out and listened as his master
hailed a passing hanso