n sounded, not in his ear. He answered the voice
with a sighing 'Yes,' and then looked up and wondered.

'Dad,' he said aloud, 'am I making confession? Do you follow these
memories? Have I only to glass things in my mind for you to see them?'

He waited in a sudden awe. He would make no answer of his own; he would
lend the aid of no obscure mechanism of the brain to any tricking of
himself. No answer came, and he sat disheartened, staring at the one
visible hill which peered like a shadow from the other shadows in the
midst of which he dwelt.

A minute later he was ten years forward. He was seated in the
smoking-room of the Victoria Hotel at Euston, and he and Ralston were
alone. Ralston was talking.

'The soul,' he said, 'makes experiments. It writes its notes on the
body, and, having learned its own lesson, it throws the paper away. We
lose to learn value. We shall know better next time. We have to sample
our cargo, and we waste most of it, but we shall be refound for the next
voayge. Bless God for an open-air penitence, but let us have no foul air
of the cloister to turn repentance sour. So big a thing as the soul can
afford to forgive so small a thing as the body.'

'After divorce, perhaps,' said Paul; and fell to his dream again.

CHAPTER VIII

The damp, river-scented earth slipped under his feet. The blare of a
steam clarion, and the bang of a steam-driven drum, sounded, and the
naphtha lamps of the merry-go-round and the circus gleamed through
the fog. The infernal noise jigged on his brain-pan as if every flying
crotchet and quaver stamped like the hoof of a little devil in the
surface of his brain. The smell of the lamps was in his nostrils, and
with it odours of tar and stables and orange-peel.

Six-and-thirty hours had gone by since he had turned his back on
Blackfriars Bridge. It was more than fifty hours since he had tasted
food, and he had spent two days and a night in the open in fog and
rain. He had been hungry, but the pangs of hunger had passed, and he was
conscious of little but a cold nausea. He drew towards the light and the
music mechanically. In front of him, illuminated by flaring lamps (which
sparkled, he thought, as an apple of Sodom might have done when newly
cut), was a placard fixed in an iron frame, with clamps which pierced
the turf. 'One night only in Reading,' said the placard. Until then he
had not known his whereabouts.

There was no more custom for the merry-go-round,