for a few minutes; and then Mr. O'Halloran, with a yawn, rose and said
he must go home for breakfast.

"Stay a bit, O'Halloran," Lord Evelyn said, in despair; "I--I
wanted--the fact is, Mr. Brand has been asking me about Ferdinand
Lind--"

"Oh," said the bushy-headed man, with a quick glance of scrutiny at the
tall Englishman. "No, no," he added, with a smile, addressing himself
directly to Brand, "it is no use your touching anything of that kind.
You would want to know too much. You would want to have the earth dug
away from over the catacombs before you went below to follow a solitary
guide with a bit of candle. You could never be brought to understand
that the cardinal principle of all secret societies has been that
obedience is an end and aim in itself, and faith the chiefest of all the
virtues. You wouldn't take anything on trust; you have the pure English
temperament."

Brand laughed, and said nothing. But O'Halloran sat down again, and
began to talk in an idle, hap-hazard sort of fashion of the various
secret societies, religious, social, political that had become known to
the world; and of their aims, and their working, and how they had so
often fallen away into the mere preservation of mummeries, or declared
themselves only by the commission of useless deeds of revenge.

"Ah," said Brand, eagerly, "that is precisely what I have been urging on
Lord Evelyn. How can you know, in joining such an association, that you
are not becoming the accomplices of men who are merely planning
assassination? And what good can come of that? How are you likely to
gain anything by the dagger? The great social and political changes of