“Then this”, Stanhope said, “is a last visit?”

“Yes,” Pauline said. “I’m going up to London tomorrow morning.”

“You’ll like the work,” Stanhope went on. “Odd-to know that when you don’t know what it is. You do know that?”

“Under the Mercy,” she said. “I’m to see my uncle’s man tomorrow at twelve, and if he approves me I shall start work at once. So then, my uncle says, I can stay with them for a few days till I’ve found rooms or a room.”

“You’ll send me the address?” he asked.

She answered: “Of course. You’ll stop here still?”

He nodded, and for the minute there was silence. Then she added: “Most people seem to be trying to move.”

“Most,” he said, “but some won’t and some can’t and some needn’t. You must, of course. But I think I might as well stop. There are flowers, and fruit, and books, and if anyone wants me, conversation, and so on-till the plague stops.”

She asked, looking at him: “Do you know how long it will last?”

He shrugged a little: “If it’s what my grandmother would have called it,” he said, “one of the vials of the Apocalypse — why, perhaps a thousand years, those of the millennium before the judgment. On the other hand, since that kind of thousand years is asserted to be a day, perhaps till tomorrow morning. We’re like the Elizabethan drama, living in at least two time schemes.”

She said: “It is that?”

“As a thief in the night’,” he answered. “Could you have a better description? Something is stealing from us our dreams and deceptions and everything but actuality.”

“Will they die?” she asked.

“I don’t think anyone will die,” he said, “unless — and God redeem us all! — into the second death. But I think the plague will spread. The dead were very thick here; perhaps that was why it began here.”

“And Adela?” she asked, and Myrtle?”

“Why, that is for them,” he answered.

But she opened on him a smile of serenity, saying: “And for you.”

“I will talk Nature to Miss Fox,” he said, “and Art to Miss Hunt. If they wish. But I think Prescott may be better for Miss Hunt; he’s an almost brutal realist, and I shall remain a little Augustan, even in heaven.”

“And I?” she asked, “I?”

“Incipit vita nova,” he answered. “You-by the way, what train are you catching tomorrow? I’ll come and see you off.”

“Half-past ten,” she said, and he nodded and went on: “You’ll find your job and do it and keep it-in the City of our God, even in the City of the Great King, and . . . and how do I, any more than you, know what the details of Salem will be like?”

She stood up, luxuriously stretching. “No,” she said, “perhaps not. I suppose poets are superfluous in Salem?”

“I have wondered myself,” he admitted. “But you needn’t realize it so quickly. If the redeemed sing, presumably someone must write the songs. Well-I’ll see you at the station tomorrow?”

“Yes, please,” she said, as they moved to the door, and then silently down the drive under a night blazing with stars. At the gate she gave him her hand. “It seems so funny to be talking about trains in the easier circles of . . . ” As she hesitated he laughed at her.

“Are you afraid to name it?” he asked, and with a blush she said hastily: “ . . . heaven. O good night.” “Till tomorrow and good night,” he said. “Go with God.”

She took two steps, paused and looked back. “Thank you for heaven,” she said. “Good night.”

The next morning they were on the platform together, chatting of her prospects and capacities, when as they turned in their walk Pauline said: “Peter, look-there’s Mr. Wentworth. Is he coming to London too? He looks ill, doesn’t he?”

“Very ill,” Stanhope said gravely. “Shall we speak?” They moved down the platform, and as Wentworth turned his head in her direction Pauline smiled and waved. He looked at her vaguely, waggled a hand, and ceased. They came to him.

“Good morning, Mr. Wentworth,” Pauline said. “Are you going to London too?”

He looked away from them with an action as deliberate as if he had looked at them. He said in a low mumble: “Must excuse me . . . bad chill . . . bones feel it . . . can’t remember bones . . . faces . . . bones of faces, I mean.”

Stanhope said — “Wentworth! Wentworth! . . . stop here.”

The voice seemed to penetrate Wentworth’s mind. His eyes crawled back along the platform, up to Stanhope’s face; there they rested on the mouth as if they could not get farther than the place of the voice, they could not connect voice and eyes. He said: “Can’t stop . . . must get to . . . ” There,” exhausted, he stopped.

Pauline heard their train coming. She said: “May I travel with you, Mr. Wentworth?”

At that he came awake; he looked at her, and then again away. He said in a tone of alarm: “No, no. Told you Guard was right. Travelling with a lady. Good-bye, good-bye,” and hastily and clumsily made off up the platform as the train drew in. He scrambled into a distant compartment. Pauline sprang into her own, and turning looked at Stanhope.

“O Peter!” she said, “what’s wrong

He had been gazing after Wentworth; he turned back to her. “I think he has seen the Gorgon’s head that was hidden from Dante in Dis,” he said. “Well. . . . Pray for him, and for me, and for all. You will write?”

She stretched her hand from the window. “Will I write?” she said. “Good-bye. But, Peter, ought I to do anything?”

“You can’t do anything unless he chooses,” he answered. “If he doesn’t choose. . . . Pray. Good-bye. Go in peace,”

His eyes challenged her on the word; this time she did not pause. “Go in peace,” she said, “and thank you still.” The train began to move; he waved to her till she was out of sight, and then went out of the station to walk in the streets and sit by the beds of Battle Hill.

Wentworth sat in his corner. He felt he had forgotten something, and slowly and laboriously he went over in his mind all that he ought to possess. He found it difficult to remember why he had left his house at all. His servants had refused to stay; they had all gone that morning; so he had had to go. He couldn’t take the trouble to get others; he hadn’t enough energy. He would come to London, to an hotel; there he would be quiet, and not see any ghosts. A horrible screaming ghost had looked in through his window, a ghost that had fallen down in a fit, and he had had to go out and drag it away so that other ghosts could find it. He had been afraid of them since, and of those two just now who had made mouths at him, calling him by a strange word. He was going somewhere too. He was going to a supper. He had his evening things with him in his bag. It would be necessary to dress for the supper, the supper of scholars, of historical scholars, and he was an historical scholar. He remembered what he was, if not who he was. It was true he had said the Grand Duke’s Guard was correct though it wasn’t, but he was an historical scholar, and he was going to his own kind of people, to Aston Moffatt.

As the name came to him, Wentworth sat up in his corner and became almost his own man again. He hated Aston Moffatt. Hate still lived in him a little, and hate might almost have saved him, though nothing else could, had he hated with a scholar’s hate. He did not; his hate and his grudge were personal and obscene. In its excitement nevertheless he remembered what he had left behind — his watch. He had over-wound it weeks ago, on some day when he had seen a bad play, and had put it by to have it mended. But it was too much trouble, and now he had left it in his drawer, and couldn’t tell the time. There would be clocks in London, clocks all round him, all going very quickly, because time went very quickly. It went quickly because it was unending, and it was always trying to get to its own end. There was only one point in it with which he had any concern-the time of the last supper. It would be the last supper; he would not go and meet Aston Moffatt again. But he would go to-night because he had accepted and had his clothes, and to show he was not afraid of Moffatt. That was the only time he wanted to know, the time of his last supper. Afterwards, everything would look after itself. He slept in his corner, his last sleep.

The train stopped at Marylebone, and he woke. He muddled on, with the help of a porter, to the Railway Hotel. He had thought of that in the train; it would save bother. He usually went to some other, but he couldn’t remember which. The ordinary habits of his body carried him on, and the automatic habit of his mind, including his historic automatic. History was his hobby, his habit; it had never been more. Its austerity was as far from him now as the Eucharists offered in the Church of St. Mary la Bonne, or the duties of the dead, or the ceremonies of substituted love. He automatically booked a room, ate some lunch, and then lay down. This time he did not sleep; the noise of London kept him awake; besides he was alone. The creature that had been with him so long was with him no more. It had gone upstairs with him for the last time two nights before, and had his former faculties lived he would have seen how different it was. After the passage of the dead man it had never quite regained its own illusive apparition; senility and youth had mingled in its face, and in their mingling found a third degree of corruption. At the hour of the falling in of the shed of Lilith it had thinned to a shape of twilight. Meaning and apparent power had gone out of it. it was a thing the dead man might have met under his own pallid sky, and less even than that. In the ghostly night that fell on the ruins of Gomorrah it had tottered round its father and paramour, who did not yet know through what destruction they went. His eyes were dimmed. Those who look, in Stanhope’s Dantean phrase, on the head of the Gorgon in Dis, do not know, until Virgil has left them, on what they gaze. In the night she was withdrawn; the substance of illusion in her faded, and alongside his heavy sleep she changed and changed, through all degrees of imbecile decay, till at last she was quite dispelled.

He was alone. He lay awake, and waking became aware of his ancient dream. Now he was near the end of his journey. He saw below him the rope drawn nearer and nearer to the wall, if it were a wall. He looke............