appeared to take a fiendish delight in going wrong--which in Simon's
case meant largely that they were going in opposition to his wishes.
He briefly recapitulated a few of his major troubles as he hurried
along on his homeward way.

First, there was dissension in his household, where his son was in
almost open rebellion against the paternal authority in the matter of
Sheila Graham, supported, Varr guessed, by the mild approval of his
mother. Second, there was the situation at the tannery, where a bunch
of incipient lunatics had gone completely mad and struck against
conditions that had previously been satisfactory to them and their
fathers before them. Last, but by no means least, was the discontent
in the office itself, what with a partner who had been bitten by the
bug of ambition--! A much-abused, sorely-tried man raised angry eyes
to Heaven and demanded of it, "What _next_?"

And as he literally lifted his gaze from the trail, seeking an answer
in the sky, he saw something that halted him abruptly. He stood rooted
in his tracks, his head thrust slightly forward, very much as a keen
pointer freezes at the sight of game.

The path he was following was one that ascended by gentle gradients
from the tannery to his big house on the crest of the low hill. A
narrow strip of meadowland on the edge of the town was crossed, then
the path, as it reached the rising ground, plunged into a deep belt of
heavy woods that stretched away on each side for the distance of a mile
or more; at the end, the trail crested a rather sharp acclivity before
emerging from the trees and linking up with a graveled path that
circled a kitchen garden in the rear of the house.

Varr had just reached the foot of this last ascent at the moment he
looked up. Twenty yards ahead of him he could see the end of the path,
marked by a pale oblong of sky set in a dark frame of foliage, but it
was not that familiar sight which held him spellbound, started his
pulse to beating quickly and momentarily stopped his breath on a
painful gasp mingled of astonishment and fear.

Silhouetted against the sky was a tall figure dressed from head to foot
in a black garment such as a monk might wear, but almost instantly Varr
recognized that there was something in this costume that was out of
keeping with the orthodox monastic habit. What the discrepancy might
be he could not determine in those seconds of bewilderment, but he knew
it existed. The outline against