folds of the evening paper. The air seemed full of Margaret
Aubyn's name. The motion of the train set it dancing up and down
on the page of a magazine that a man in front of him was reading. . . .

At the door he was told that Mrs. Glennard was still out, and he
went upstairs to his room and dragged the books from his pocket.
They lay on the table before him like live things that he feared
to touch. . . . At length he opened the first volume. A familiar
letter sprang out at him, each word quickened by its glaring garb
of type. The little broken phrases fled across the page like
wounded animals in the open. . . . It was a horrible sight. . . .
A battue of helpless things driven savagely out of shelter. He
had not known it would be like this. . . .

He understood now that, at the moment of selling the letters, he
had viewed the transaction solely as it affected himself: as an
unfortunate blemish on an otherwise presentable record. He had
scarcely considered the act in relation to Margaret Aubyn; for
death, if it hallows, also makes innocuous. Glennard's God was a
god of the living, of the immediate, the actual, the tangible; all
his days he had lived in the presence of that god, heedless of the
divinities who, below the surface of our deeds and passions,
silently forge the fatal weapons of the dead.



VII


A knock roused him and looking up he saw his wife. He met her