one's honour, never mind what the excuse is.
There's no conceivable way of arguing out of that. That's what I shall
ask you to do on Tuesday and I'm just warning you so you shall have time
to think beforehand."

He took his pen, and steadied his hand, and wrote:

"And your reply, when I ask you, whichever it is, shall bring me light
into darkness, unutterable darkness.--M."

He could hear the homeward movements about the office. It was time to
go. He wheeled his bicycle to the letter box at the corner of The
Precincts. As he dropped in his letter, the evening edition of Pike's
paper came bawling around the corner.

AUSTRIA
DECLARES WAR
ON SERVIA

He shook his head at the paper the boy held out to him and rode away.
What had that kind of thing to do with him?

VIII

Unutterable darkness! He lived within it during the days that followed
while he awaited the day appointed to write to Nona again. He had put
away that for which, with a longing that was almost physical in its
pain, his spirit craved; and craved the more terribly for his denial of
it. Whatever she said when he asked, whichever way she answered him, he
would be brought relief from his intolerable stress. If she maintained
honour above love, his weakness, he knew, would be welded into strength,
as the presence of another brings enormous support to timidity; if she
declared for love,--his mind surged within him at the imagination of
bursting away once and for ever the squeamish principles which for
years, hedging about his conduct on this side and on that, had profited
nothing those on whose behalf they had been erected and his own life had
desolated into barrenness.

He was little disposed, in these dismays and in this darkness, to divert
attention to the international disturbances which now were rumbling
across the newspapers in portentous and enormous headlines. Ireland was
pressed away. It was all Europe now--thrones, chancelleries, councils,
armies. He tried to say, "What of it?" Many in Great Britain tried to
say, "What of it?" Crises and deadlocks again! Meaningless and empty
words, for months and years past worked to death and rendered hollow as
empty vessels. Some one would climb down. Some one always climbed down.

Nobody climbed down.

The cauldron whose seething and bubbling had entertained some, fidgeted
some, some nothing at all concerned, suddenly boiled over, and poured in
boiling fat upon the flames, and poured in flames upon the