Nonconformist church with a hymn-book and Bible under my arm. I even see myself a deacon, or an elder, or something of that sort. Not right, when it is having such a regenerating influence?"

"Stick to your guns, you chaps," remarked Winfield quietly, who had been the silent member of the party.

"But I must have fair play," said Leicester. "I want a fair field and no favour. All I demand is that you chaps shall hold your tongues. This conversation must not go beyond these walls. That's fair, isn't it?"

"That's nothing but just," said Winfield.

"But how are you to get an introduction?" said Sprague. "Old John Castlemaine is very particular as to whom he has at his house, and although I have consented to this business, I'll take no part in it."

"Nor I," said Purvis; "and now I come to think about it, I withdraw from it altogether."

"Except to pay your hundred pounds if I succeed," said Leicester.

"You can't back out from that," remarked Winfield.

"Still, I'll be a party to nothing," he said weakly. "Of course I know it'll end in nothing. Miss Castlemaine is one of the cleverest women I know, and she'll see through everything at a glance."

"Then I'm to have fair play?"

"Oh yes, I shall not interfere with you. There will be no need."

"That is to say, not a whisper of this conversation goes outside this room."

"Of course that is but fair," urged Winfield again.

"Very well," said Purvis, "I shall say nothing; but mind you, I do not believe in the business. It's wrong, it's not—well, it's not in good form. But there, it doesn't matter. It'll end in nothing."

"Exactly," said Leicester; but there was a strange light in his eyes. "And you, Sprague, you'll act straight, too?"

"Oh, certainly," said Sprague. "I shall say nothing; all the same, I don't like it. But Leicester'll give up the whole idea to-morrow. He'd never have thought of it to-night if he hadn't been drunk."

"I drunk, my friends! I am as sober as the Nonconforming parson of the church that Miss Castlemaine attends. I'm as serious as a judge. No, no, I stand on principle—principle, my friends. I have a theory of life, and I stand by it, and I am ready to make sacrifices."

"But how are you to get an introduction?" asked Sprague. Evidently he was uneasy in his mind.

"Leave that to me; I ask you to do nothing but to hold your tongues, and that you've promised to do. I stand alone. I'm like your Martin Luther of old times. Against me are arrayed conventions and orthodoxy, pride and prejudice, thunders temporal and spiritual, but I fear them not. I—I, a poor solitary cynic, am stronger than you all, because I stand on the truth, and you stand on sentiment, convention, orthodoxy. Gentlemen, I drink to you in very mediocre club whisky; nay, I don't drink to you, I drink to the man who stands on the truth—truth, gentlemen, truth!"

Again he lifted a glass of whisky to his lips and set it down empty.

"I'm going to bed," said Sprague.

"And I," said Purvis.

"And I, gentlemen," said Leicester, "remain here. Like all men who undertake great enterprises, I must make my plans. As a champion of truth I must vindicate it. I live to rid the world of lies, of sham, of hypocrisy. Good-night, gentlemen, good-night."

The whisky was beginning to show its effects at last, although his voice was still clear, his hand still steady. An unhealthy flush had come to his cheeks; the strange look in his eyes had become more pronounced.

And yet had a stranger entered the room at that moment, that stranger would have been struck by his tall, stalwart figure and his striking face. For Radford Leicester was no ordinary-looking man. Compared with him the others were commonplace. Neither was his face a bad face. It suggested lack of faith and lack of hope, but it did not suggest evil. Moreover, the well-shaped head, the broad forehead, the finely formed features, suggested intellectuality and force of character. It also told of a man whom nothing could daunt when his mind was made up. But it was not the face of a happy man. No man who is without faith and hope can be.

Radford Leicester had come into the world handicapped. His father was a hard drinker before him, and he had inherited the love for alcohol. But more, he had been educated in a bad school. His mother had died when he was a child, and thus he became entirely under his father's influence. His father was a clever man, but a man whom life had embittered. He had been embittered by the death of his wife; he had been embittered because he had never obtained the success he had coveted. He saw men who did not possess half the brains or half the scholarship which he possessed, leap into fame, while he remained obscure. Perhaps this was because his theory of life was so utterly hopeless, and his faith in men and women was so little. Young Radford was naturally influenced by his father's views and his father's character, and thus by the time he was old enough to go to a public school he was, like Shelley, an atheist.

Presently his father, who was ambitious for his son's future, sent him to Oxford. He became a student at Magdalen College, where he obtained, not only a reputation as a scholar and a debater, but he became notorious pretty much on the same lines that Shelley became notorious. He became more and more imbued with the materialistic philosophy which was accepted by a certain section of the men there; indeed, he became their leader and spokesman. He professed an utter contempt for life. He regarded men and women as so many worthless things spawned upon the shores of time, to be presently swept away into nothingness. He had little or no faith in the nobility of human nature. Men were mostly sordid, selfish, and base. Trace men's motives to their source, and they were in the main selfish. Women were, if possible, worse than men. When he was about twenty-four he altered his opinion for a time. He fell in love with a girl who fascinated him by her wit, her beauty, and what he believed to be her goodness. For a time his love made him cast off his father's hopeless philosophy. He formed plans for the future. Through his mother he possessed an income which, while not large, placed him in a position of affluence. It was large enough to enable him to enter Parliament, where he believed he could make for himself a brilliant future.

He proposed to the girl with whom he had become enamoured, and was accepted. He had barely become a happy accepted lover, however, when a young barrister who had won a great deal of praise at the Bar, and had also entered Parliament, where he was spoken of as a man with a great future, also proposed to her. Without hesitation this girl, Blanche Bridgetown by name, cast Leicester aside and accepted the man who had made a reputation, rather than keep her faith with one whose future was uncertain. In this decision Blanche Bridgetown was largely influenced by her mother.

Radford Leicester soon recovered from the wound he had received in his heart, but he did not recover from the blow which was struck at his faith. All his old cynicism and hopelessness reasserted themselves. Whenever he spoke of women he spoke bitterly, his outlook on life became less cheerful than ever.

Then another element entered his life. Up to this time he had not been a hard drinker; but now the taste which he had inherited grew stronger. Drink made him forget his wounded pride; and, confident in his boast that no distilled spirits could ever affect him outwardly, he indulged in this evil habit more and more freely.

Still, pride was not dead. Professing, as he did, that life was a miserable sort of affair at the best, he still had ambition. He wanted to carve out for himself a place of position and power. His party had found a constituency for him, and he had contested it. At the time of the contest, however, the political opinions which Radford had adopted were not popular. His opponent won the seat.

Again he was embittered, again his pride was wounded, and