with debt, and weakened by little sleep and much liquor, was removed to a less exciting atmosphere.  With all his faults, he left faithful friends in the Markovitch flat, and he, on his side, gave so enthusiastic an account of Mme. Markovitch’s attempts to restrain and modify his impetuosities that the Embassy recommended her care and guidance to other young secretaries.  The war came and Vera Michailovna declared that she could have lodgers no longer, and a terrible blow this was to Ivan Petrovitch.  Then suddenly, towards the end of 1916, she changed her mind and announced to the Embassy that she was ready for any one whom they could send her.  Henry Bohun was offered, accepted, and prepared for.  Ivan Petrovitch was a happy man once more.

I never discovered that Markovitch was much consulted in these affairs.  Vera Michailovna “ran” the flat financially, industrially, and spiritually.  Markovitch meanwhile was busy with his inventions.  I have, as yet, said nothing about Nicolai Leontievitch’s inventions.  I hesitate, indeed, to speak of them, although they are so essential, and indeed important a part of my story.  I hesitate simply because I do not wish this narrative to be at all fantastic, but that it should stick quite honestly and obviously to the truth.  It is certain moreover that what is naked truth to one man seems the falsest fancy to another, and after all I have, from beginning to end, only my own conscience to satisfy.  The history of the human soul and its relation to divinity which is, I think, the only history worth any man’s pursuit must push its way, again and again, through this same tangled territory which infests the region lying between truth and fantasy; one passes suddenly into a world that seems pure falsehood, so askew, so obscure, so twisted and coloured is it.  One is through, one looks back and it lies behind one as the clearest truth.  Such an experience makes one tender to other men’s fancies and less impatient of the vague and half-defined travellers’ tales that other men tell.  Childe Roland is not the only traveller who has challenged the Dark Tower.

In the Middle Ages Nicolai Leontievitch Markovitch would have been called, I suppose, a Magician—­a very half-hearted and unsatisfactory one he would always have been—­and he would have been most certainly burnt at the stake before he had accomplished any magic worthy of the name.  His inventions, so far as I saw anything of them, were innocent and simple enough.  It was the man himself rather than his inventions that arrested the attention.  About the time of Bohun’s arrival upon the scene it was a new kind of ink that he had discovered, and for many weeks the Markovitch flat dripped ink from every pore.  He had no laboratory, no scientific materials, nor, I think, any profound knowledge.  The room where he worked was a small box-like place off the living-room, a cheerless enough abode with a little high barred window in it as in a prison-cell, cardboard-boxes