"I called to you ... but called to you in play," thought whispered
somewhere deep below the level of any speech, yet not so low that the
audacious sound of it did not crash above the elements outside; "for
... till now ... you have been to me but a ... coated bogy ... that my
brain disowned with laughter ... and my heart thought picturesque. If
you are here ... _alive_! May God forgive me for my ..."

It seemed as though tears--the tears of love and profound
commiseration--drowned the very seed of thought itself. A sound stopped him that was like a collapse in heaven. Some crashing,
as of a ruined world, passed splintering through his little timid
heart. He did not yield, but he understood--with an understanding which
seemed the delicate first sign of yielding--the seductiveness of evil,
the sweet delight of surrendering the Will with utter recklessness
to those swelling forces which disintegrate the heroic soul in man. He remembered. It was true. In the reaction from excess he _had_
definitely called upon his childhood's teaching with a passing moment
of genuine belief. And now that yearning of a fraction of a second bore
its awful fruit. The luscious Capitals where he had rioted passed in
a coloured stream before his eyes; the Wine, the Woman, and the Song
stood there before him, clothed in that Power which lies insinuatingly
disguised behind their little passing show of innocence. Their glamour
donned this domino of regal and virile grandeur. He felt entangled
beyond recovery. The idea of God seemed sterile and without reality. The one real thing, the one desirable thing, the one possible, strong
and beautiful thing--was to bend his head and kiss those imperial
fingers. He moved noiselessly towards the Hand. He raised his own to
take it and lift it towards his mouth----

When there rose in his mind with startling vividness a small, soft
picture of a child's nursery, a picture of a little boy, kneeling in
scanty night-gown with pink upturned soles, and asking ridiculous,
audacious things of a shining Figure seated on a summer cloud above the
kitchen-garden walnut tree. The tiny symbol flashed and went its way, yet not before it had lit
the entire world with glory. For there came an absolutely routing
power with it. In that half-forgotten instant's craving for the simple
teaching of his childhood days, Belief had conjured with two immense
traditions. This was the second of them. The appearance of the one had
inevitably produced the passage of its opposite....

And the Hand that floated in the air before him to be kissed sank
slowly down below the possible level of his lips. He shrank away. Though laughter tempted something in his brain, there still clung
about his heart the first aching, pitying terror. But size retreated,
dwindling somehow as it went. The wind and rain obliterated every other
sound; yet in that bare, unfurnished room of a climber's mountain hut,
there was a silence, above the roar, that drank in everything and broke
the back of speech. In opposition to this masquerading splendour Delane
had set up a personal, paternal Deity. "I thought of you, perhaps," cried the voice of self-defence, "but I
did not call to you with real belief. And, by the name of God, I did
not summon you. For your sweetness, as your power, sickens me; and your
hand is black with the curses of all the mothers in the world, whose
prayers and tears----"

He stopped dead, overwhelmed by the cruelty of his reckless utterance. And the Other moved towards him slowly. It was like the summit of some
peaked and terrible height that moved. He spoke. He changed appallingly. "But _I_ claim," he roared, "your heart. I claim you by that instant of
belief you felt. For by that alone you shall restore to me my vanished
Kingdom. You shall worship me." In the countenance was a sudden awful power; but behind the stupefying
roar there was weakness in the voice as of an imploring and beseeching
child. Again, deep love and searching pity seared the Englishman's
heart as he replied in the gentlest accents he could find to master:

"And I claim _you_," he said, "by my understanding sympathy, and by my
sorrow for your God-forsaken loneliness, and by my love. For no Kingdom
built on hate can stand against the love you would deny----"

Words failed him then, as he saw the majesty fade slowly from the
face, grown small and shadowy. One last expression of desperate energy
in the eyes struck lightnings from the smoky air, as with an abandoned
movement of the entire figure, he drew back, it seemed, towards the
door behind him. Delane moved slowly after him, opening his arms. Tenderness and big
compassion flung wide the gates of love within him. He found strange
language, too, although actual, spoken words did not produce them
further than his entrails where they had their birth. "Toys in the world are plentiful, Sire, and you may have them for your
masterpiece of play. But you must seek them where they still survive;
in the churches, and in isolated lands where thought lies unawakened. For they are the children's blocks of make-believe whose palaces, like
your once tremendous kingdom, have no true existence for the thinking
mind." And he stretched his hands towards him with the gesture of one who
sought to help and save, then paused as he realised that his arms
enclosed sheer blackness, with the emptiness of wind and driving rain. For the door of the hut stood open, and Delane balanced on the
threshold, facing the sheet of night above the abyss. He heard the
waterfalls in the valley far below. The forest flapped and tossed
its myriad branches. Cold draughts swept down from spectral fields
of melting snow above; and the blackness turned momentarily into
the semblance of towers and bastions of thick beaten gloom. Above
one soaring turret, then, a space of sky appeared, swept naked by a
violent, lost wind--an opening of purple into limitless distance. For
one second, amid the vapours, it was visible, empty and untenanted. The next, there sailed across its small diameter a falling Star. With
an air of slow and endless leisure, yet at the same time with terrific
speed, it dived behind the ragged curtain of the clouds, and the space
closed up again. Blackness returned upon the heavens. And through this blackness, plunging into that abyss of woe whence
he had momentarily risen, the figure of the marvellous stranger
melted utterly away. Delane, for a fleeting second, was aware of the
earnestness in the sad, imploring countenance; of its sweetness and
its power so strangely mingled; of it mysterious grandeur; and of its
pathetic childishness. But, already, it was sunk into interminable
distance. A star that would be baleful, yet was merely glorious, passed
on its endless wandering among the teeming systems of the universe. Behind the fixed and steady stars, secure in their appointed places, it
set. It vanished into the pit of unknown emptiness. It was gone. "God help you!"