* * * * *

Ah, I see something now!  I see! it was for this that I was preserved:  I to be a sort of new-fangled Adam—­and this little creature to be my Eve!  That is it! The White does not admit defeat:  he would recommence the Race again!  At the last, the eleventh hour—­in spite of all—­he would turn defeat into victory, and outwit that Other.

However, if this be so—­and I seem to see it quite clearly—­then in that White scheme is a singular flaw:  at one point, it is obvious, that elaborate Forethought fails:  for I have a free will—­and I refuse, I refuse.

Certainly, in this matter I am on the side of the Black:  and since it depends absolutely upon me, this time Black wins.

No more men on the earth after me, ye Powers!  To you the question may be nothing more than a gambling excitement as to the final outcome of your aerial squabble:  but to the poor men who had to bear the wrongs, Inquisitions, rack-rents, Waterloos, unspeakable horrors, it was hard earnest, you know!  Oh the wretchedness—­the deep, deep pain—­of that bungling ant-hill, happily wiped out, my God!  My sweetheart Clodagh ... she was not an ideal being!  There was a man called Judas who betrayed the gentle Founder of the Christian Faith, and there was some Roman king named Galba, a horrid dog, and there was a French devil, Gilles de Raiz:  and the rest were all much the same, much the same.  Oh no, it was not a good race, that small infantry which called itself Man:  and here, falling on my knees before God and Satan as I write, I swear, I swear:  Never through me shall it spring and fester again.

* * * * *

I cannot realise her!  Not at all, at all, at all!  If she is out of my sight and hearing ten minutes, I fall to doubting her reality.  If I lose her for half a day, all the old feelings, resembling certainties, come back, that I have only been dreaming—­that this appearance cannot be an actual objective fact of life, since the impossible is impossible.

Seventeen long years, seventeen long years, of madness....

* * * * *

To-morrow I start for Imbros:  and whether this girl chooses to follow me, or whether she stays behind, I will see her from the moment I land no more.

* * * * *

She must rise very early.  I who am now regularly on the palace-roof at dawn, sometimes from between the pavilion-curtains of the galleries, or from the steps of the telescope-kiosk, may spy her far down below, a dainty microscopic figure, generally running about the sward, or gazing up in wonder at the palace from the lake-edge.

It is now three months since she came with me to Imbros.