re my eyes.

If I did not believe with all my soul that out of Darkness cometh
Light, I would take my old service revolver from its holster and blow
out my brains this very minute. The eternal laughter of the earth has
ever since its creation pierced through the mist of tears in which at
times it has been shrouded. What has been will be. Nay, more, what has
been shall be. It is the Law of what I believe to be God.... As a
concrete instance, where do you find a fuller expression of the divine
gaiety of the human spirit than in the Houses of Pain, strewn the
length and breadth of the land, filled with maimed and shattered men
who have looked into the jaws of Hell? If it comes to that, I have
looked into them myself, and have heard the heroic jests of men who
looked with me.

For some years up to the outbreak of the war which has knocked all
so-called modern values silly, my young friends, with a certain
respectful superciliousness, regarded me as an amiable person
hopelessly out of date. Now that we are at grip with elementals, I find
myself, if anything, in advance of the fashion. This, however, by the
way. What I am clumsily trying to explain is that if I am to make this
story intelligible I must start from the darkness where its roots lie
hidden. And that darkness is the black depths of the canal by the lock
gates where Althea Fenimore's body was found.

It was high June, in leafy England, in a world at peace. Can one
picture it? With such a wrench of memory does one recall scenes of
tender childhood. In the shelter of a stately house lived Althea
Fenimore. She was twenty-one; pretty, buxom, like her mother, modern,
with (to me) a pathetic touch of mid-Victorian softness and
sentimentality; independent in outward action, what we call "open-air";
yet an anomaly, fond at once of games and babies. I have seen her in
the morning tearing away across country by the side of her father, the
most passionate and reckless rider to hounds in the county, and in the
evening I have come across her, a pretty mass of pink flesh and
muslin--no, it can't be muslin--say chiffon--anyhow, something white
and filmy and girlish--curled up on a sofa and absorbed in a novel of
Mrs. Henry Wood, borrowed, if one could judge by the state of its
greasy brown paper cover, from the servants' hall. I confess that,
though to her as to her brother I was "Uncle Duncan," and loved her as
a dear, sweet English girl, I found her lacking in spirituality,