him; but, as he sat late on the Saturday night, finally arranging his notes, he began to be conscious of new and surprising thoughts about the coming event Earlier in the evening he had been talking to Hands, but the archaeologist had gone to bed and left him alone.
The day had been a gloomy one. A black pall of fog fell over London at dawn, and had remained all day, almost choking him as he said evensong in the almost empty church.
All day long he had felt strangely overweighted and depressed. A chance paragraph in an evening paper, stating that Mr. Schuabe, M.P., had returned from a short Continental trip, started an uneasy and gloomy train of thought. The memory of the terrible night at Walktown recurred to him with a horrible sense of unreality, the picture blurred somewhat, as if the fingers of the disease which had struck him down had already been pressing on his brain when he had been alone with the millionaire. Much of what he remembered of that dread interview must have been delusion. And yet in all other matters he was sane and unprejudiced enough. Many times he had met and argued with unbelievers. They had saddened him, but no more. Why was it that this man, notorious atheist as he was, filled him with a shuddering fear, a horror for which he had no name?
Then also, what had been the significance of the incident at Dieppe, its true significance? Sir Robert Llwellyn had also inspired him with a feeling of utter loathing and abhorrence, though perhaps in a less degree. There was the sudden glimpse of Schuabe's signature on the letter. What was the connection between the two men? How could the Antichristian be in friendly communion with the greatest Higher Critic of the time?
He recalled an even more sinister occurrence, or so it had seemed to him. Two days after his first introduction
