n
had faded; the afterglow was quenched in the blackness of a night that
drew out of the east and fell from the zenith as a curtain of utter
darkness.

Again Challis came to my rescue. He brought me a great sheaf of notes.

"Look here," he said, "if you can't write a true history of that strange
child, I see no reason why you should not write his story as it is
known to you, as it impinges on your own life. After all, you, in many
ways, know more of him than any one. You came nearest to receiving his
confidence."

"But only during the last few months," I said.

"Does that matter?" said Challis with an upheaval of his
shoulders--"shrug" is far too insignificant a word for that mountainous
humping. "Is any biography founded on better material than you have at
command?"

He unfolded his bundle of notes. "See here," he said, "here is some
magnificent material for you--first-hand observations made at the time.
Can't you construct a story from that?"

Even then I began to cast my story in a slightly biographical form. I
wrote half a dozen chapters, and read them to Challis.

"Magnificent, my dear fellow," was his comment, "magnificent; but no one
will believe it."

I had been carried away by my own prose, and with the natural vanity of
the author, I resented intensely his criticism.

For some weeks I did not see Challis again, and I persisted in my futile
endeavour, but always as I wrote that killing suggestion insinuated
itself: "No one will believe you." At times I felt as a man may feel who
has spent many years in a lunatic asylum; and after his release is for
ever engaged in a struggle to allay the doubts of a leering suspicion.

I gave up the hopeless task at last, and sought out Challis again.

"Write it as a story," he suggested, "and give up the attempt to carry
conviction."

And in that spirit, adopting the form of a story, I did begin, and in
that form I hope to finish.

But here as I reach the great division, the determining factor of Victor
Stott's life, I am constrained to pause and apologise. I have become
uncomfortably conscious of my own limitations, and the feeble, ephemeral
methods I am using. I am trifling with a wonderful story, embroidering
my facts with the tawdry detail of my own imagining.

I saw--I see--no other way.

This is, indeed, a preface, yet I prefer to put it in this place, since
it was at this time I wrote it.

* * * * *

On the Common a