him to apathetic despair. "There is no God--no good anywhere!" he cried.
But in time Lilian's periodic letters gave him heart and hope, and he
had accepted his fate bravely, trying to lift up and cheer his fellow-
prisoners. In the darkness and uproar of a thunderstorm he escapes from
the guarded works. His adventures, during which he comes accidentally
and unrecognized in contact with his brother's widow, his sister, and
her children, who prattle of family matters in his hearing, and, after a
few weeks' wandering, by his being recaptured while lying on the
roadside unconscious from hunger and exhaustion. This part of the story
concludes with the reception of this news by Lilian and Cyril, whose
unintentional neglect has caused the miscarriage of a letter that would
have enabled Henry to escape.


_IV.--"I Will Confess my Wickedness"_


Everard is free, and, wearing the grey suit of a discharged prisoner, is
travelling from Dartmoor to London by train. Marion, his brother,
Leslie, Mrs. Maitland, and the admiral are all dead. Everything is
strange and changed to him. Liberty is sweet and bitter. He is
prematurely aged and broken down; the great future that had been before
him is now for ever impossible. His still undeveloped scientific
theories and discoveries have been anticipated by others. He feels the
prison taint upon him; he will not see Lilian until it is removed, and
he has become accustomed to the bewilderment of freedom.

After a few days' pause he starts from London for Malbourne, stopping at
Belminster, through which he had made his last free journey with Cyril,
when he told him that "an ascetic is a rake turned monk." Passing the