mpty
sky, as cold as snow, as hard as hail, frozen and dead. There was no
meaning in his happiness. No one had sent it to him. There was no one to
thank for it. His felicity was a closed circle, a wall of ice.

"Let us go back," he said sadly to Athenais; "the child is heavy upon
my shoulder. We will lay him to sleep, and go into the library. The air
grows chilly. We were mistaken. The gratitude of life is only a dream.
There is no one to thank."

And in the garden it was already night.

V

No outward change came to the House of the Golden Pillars. Everything
moved as smoothly, as delicately, as prosperously, as before. But
inwardly there was a subtle, inexplicable transformation. A vague
discontent, a final and inevitable sense of incompleteness, overshadowed
existence from that night when Hermas realised that his joy could never
go beyond itself.

The next morning the old man whom he had seen in the Grove of Daphne,
but never since, appeared mysteriously at the door of the house, as if
he had been sent for, and entered like an invited guest.

Hermas could not but make him welcome, and at first he tried to regard
him with reverence and affection as the one through whom fortune had
come. But it was impossible. There was a chill in the inscrutable smile
of Marcion, as he called himself, that seemed to mock at reverence.
He was in the house as one watching a strange experiment--tranquil,
interested, ready to supply anything that might be needed for its
completion, but thoroughly indifferent to the feelings of the subject;
an anatomist of life, looking curiously to see how long it would
continue, and how it would act, after the heart had been removed.

In his presence Hermas was conscious of a certain irritation, a
resentful anger against the calm, frigid scrutiny of the eyes that
followed him everywhere, like a pair of spies, peering out over the
smiling mouth and the long white beard.

"Why do you look at me so curiously?" asked Hermas, one morning, as they
sat together in the library. "Do you see anything strange in me?"

"No," answered Marcion; "something familiar."

"And what is that?"

"A singular likeness to a discontented young man that I met some years
ago in the Grove of Daphne."

"But why should that interest you? Surely it was to be expected."

"A thing that we expect often surprises us when we see it. Besides, my
curiosity is piqued. I suspect you of keeping a secret from me."

"You are j