ng it
on the floor and trampling upon it. "Look at me now, John--look at me? Am
I not the same as ever? Why don't you look?"

She was fighting for her life. He started to his feet and came to her
with his teeth set and his pupils fixed. "This is only the devil tempting
me. Say your prayers, child!"

He grasped her left hand with his right. His grip almost overtaxed her
strength and she felt faint. In an explosion of emotion the insane frenzy
for destroying had come upon him again. He longed to give his feelings
physical expression.

"Say them, say them!" he cried, "God sent me to kill you, Glory!"

A sensation of terror and of triumph came over her at once. She half
closed her eyes and threw her other arm around his neck. "No, but to love
me!--Kiss me, John!"

Then a cry came from him like that of a man flinging himself over a
precipice. He threw his arms about her, and her disordered hair fell over
his face.

IX.

"I thought it was God's voice--it was the devil's!"

John Storm was creeping like a thief through the streets of London in the
dark hours before the dawn. It was a peaceful night after the
thunderstorm of the evening before. A few large stars had come out, a
clear moon, was shining, and the air was quiet after the cries, the
crackling tumult, and all the fury of human throats. There was only the
swift rattling of mail cars running to the Post Office, the heavy clank
of country carts crawling to Covent Garden, the measured tread of
policemen, and the muddled laughter of drunken men and women by the
coffee stands at the street corners. "'Ow's the deluge, myte? Not come
off yet? Well, give us a cup of cawfee on the strength of it."

It seemed as if eyes looked down on him from the dark sky and pierced him
through and through. His whole life had been an imposture from the
first--his quarrel with his father, his taking Orders, his entering the
monastery and his leaving it, his crusade in Soho, his intention of
following Father Damien, his predictions at Westminster--all, all had
been false, and the expression of a lie! He was a sham, a mockery, a
whited sepulchre, and had grossly sinned against the light and against
God.

But the spiritual disillusion had come at last, and it had revealed him
to himself at an awful depth of self-deception. Thinking in his pride and
arrogance he was the divine messenger, the avenger, the man of God, he
had set out to shed blood like any wretched criminal, any jea