His question was not very promptly answered. The stranger stood
still, regarding him intently for two of three minutes with a look
of peculiar pensiveness and abstraction, the heavy double fringe
of his long dark lashes giving an almost drowsy pathos to his
proud and earnest eyes. Soon, however, this absorbed expression
changed to one of sombre scorn.

"The world!" he said slowly and bitterly. "You think _I_ care for
the world? Then you read me wrongly at the very outset of our
interview, and your once reputed skill as a Seer goes for naught!
To me the world is a graveyard full of dead, worm-eaten things,
and its supposititious Creator, whom you have so be praised in
your orisons to-night, is the Sexton who entombs, and the Ghoul
who devours his own hapless Creation! I myself am one of the
tortured and dying, and I have sought you simply that you may
trick me into a brief oblivion of my doom, and mock me with the
mirage of a life that is not and can never be! How can you serve
me? Give me a few hours' respite from wretchedness! that is all I
ask!"

As he spoke his face grew blanched and haggard, as though he
suffered from some painfully repressed inward agony. The monk
Heliobas heard him with an air of attentive patience, but said
nothing; he therefore, after waiting for a reply and receiving
none, went on in colder and more even tones:

"I dare say my words seem strange to you--though they should not
do so if, as reported, you have studied all the varying phases of
that purely intellectual despair which, in this age of excessive