e a chess problem or an acrostic. The Creator sets
it. He knows the solution, the answer. You've got to work it out. It's
all keyed for you just as the final move in chess or the final discovery
in an acrostic is keyed up to right from the start." And on this
argument Mr. Fargus introduced Sabre to the great entertainment in
"working back" when a game of Patience failed to come out or after a
defeat in chess. You worked back to the immense satisfaction of finding
the precise point at which you went wrong. Up to that point you had
followed the keyed path; precisely there you missed it.

"Tremendous, eh?" Mr. Fargus used to say. "Terrific. If you hadn't done
that you'd have got it. That one move, all that way back, was calamity.
Calamity! What a word!"

And they would stare bemused eyes upon one another.

"You put that into life," Mr. Fargus used to say. "Imagine if every
life, at death, was worked back, and where it went wrong, where it made
its calamity, and the date, put on the tombstone. Eh? What a record!
Who'd dare walk through a churchyard?"

Sabre's objection was, "Of course no one would ever know. Suppose your
idea's correct, who's to say what a man's purpose in life was, let alone
whether he'd fulfilled it? How can you work towards a purpose if you
don't know what it is?"

Then little old Mr. Fargus would grow intense. "Why, Sabre, that's just
where you are with an acrostic or in chess. How can you work out the
solution when you don't know what the solution is?"

"Yes, but you know there is a solution."

Mr. Fargus's eyes would shine. "Well, there you are! And you know that
in life there is a purpose."

And what attracted and interested Sabre was that the little man, living
here his hunted life among the terrific "doings" of the seven female
Farguses, firmly believed that he was working out and working towards
his designed purpose. He had "worked back" his every event in life, he
said, and it had brought him so inevitably to Penny Green and to
skipping about among the seven that he was assured it was the keyed path
to his purpose. He amazed Sabre by telling him, without trace of
self-consciousness and equally without trace of religious mania, that he
was waiting, daily, for God to call upon him to fulfil the purpose for
which he was placed there. He expected it as one expects a letter by the
post. When he talked about it to Sabre he positively trembled and shone
with eagerness as a child trembling and s