merton. Now were
the scales fallen from his eyes; now he saw the evil, the injustice, the
despair; felt, in truth, the weight of the sorrow of it all, and yet that
sorrow was unaccountably transmuted, as by a chemical process, into
something which for the first time had a meaning--he could not say what
meaning. The sting of despair had somehow been taken out of it, and it
remained poignant!

Not on the obsession of the night before, when he had walked down Dalton
Street and beheld it transformed into a realm of adventure, but upon his
past life did he look back now with horror, upon the even tenor of those
days and years in the bright places. His had been the highroad of a
fancied security, from which he had feared to stray, to seek his God
across the rough face of nature, from black, forgotten capons to the
flying peaks in space. He had feared reality. He had insisted upon
gazing at the universe through the coloured glasses of an outworn
theology, instead of using his own eyes.

So he had left the highroad, the beaten way of salvation many others had
deserted, had flung off his spectacles, had plunged into reality, to be
scratched and battered, to lose his way. Not until now had something of
grim zest come to him, of an instinct which was the first groping of a
vision, as to where his own path might lie. Through what thickets and
over what mountains he knew not as yet--nor cared to know. He felt
resistance, whereas on the highroad he had felt none. On the highroad
his cry had gone unheeded and unheard, yet by holding out his hand in the
wilderness he had helped another, bruised and bleeding, to her feet!
Salvation, Let it be what it might be, he would go on, stumbling and
seeking, through reality.

Even this last revelation, of Eldon Parr's agency in another tragedy,
seemed to have no further power to affect him. . . Nor could Hodder
think of Alison as in blood-relationship to the financier, or even to the
boy, whose open, pleasure-loving face he had seen in the photograph.

II

A presage of autumn was in the air, and a fine, misty rain drifted in at
his windows as he sat at his breakfast. He took deep breaths of the
moisture, and it seemed to water and revive his parching soul. He found
himself, to his surprise, surveying with equanimity the pile of books in
the corner which had led him to the conviction of the emptiness of the
universe--but the universe was no longer empty! It was cruel, but a
warring force