that Martin seemed to have brought him last night, and, stated thus, it was a spiritual aspiration of high endeavour, and it did not occur to him how, stated ever so little differently, and yet following the lines of the communication, it assumed a diabolical aspect. The love which he had for Helena was a carnal love, that sprang from desire for her enchanting prettiness; that love he was to cling to, not sacrifice an iota of it. The hate that he felt for her, arising from her falseness, her encouragement of him for just so long as she was uncertain whether she could capture a man who was nothing to her, but whose position and wealth she coveted, Archie was to transform into indifference; he was to get over it. But, though it was hate, it had a spiritual quality, for it was hatred of what was mean and base; whereas his love for her had no spiritual quality: it was no more than lust, and to that under the name of love he was to cling.… Here, then, was another interpretation of the words he had heard last night, and, according to it, it would have been fitter to attribute the message to some intelligence far other than the innocent soul of the brother who had so mysteriously communicated with him in childlike ways. But that interpretation (and here was the subtlety of it) never entered Archie's head at all. A message of apparent consolation and hope had come to him when he was feeling the full blast of his bitterness, the wind that blew from the empty desert of his heart and his stagnant brain. He had called for help from the everlasting and unseen Cosmos that encompasses the little blind half-world of material existence, and from it, somewhere from it, a light had shone into his dark soul, no mere flicker, or so it seemed this morning, like that spurious sunshine which he and his father basked in together, but rays from a more potent luminary.
Till now Archie, with the ordinary impulse of a disappointed man, had tried to banish from his mind (with
