be. Nay, more, what has been shall be. It is the Law of what I
believe to be God.... As a concrete instance, where do you find a
fuller expression of the divine gaiety of the human spirit than in
the Houses of Pain, strewn the length and breadth of the land,
filled with maimed and shattered men who have looked into the jaws
of Hell? If it comes to that, I have looked into them myself, and
have heard the heroic jests of men who looked with me.

For some years up to the outbreak of the war which has knocked all
so-called modern values silly, my young friends, with a certain
respectful superciliousness, regarded me as an amiable person
hopelessly out of date. Now that we are at grip with elementals, I
find myself, if anything, in advance of the fashion. This,
however, by the way. What I am clumsily trying to explain is that
if I am to make this story intelligible I must start from the
darkness where its roots lie hidden. And that darkness is the
black depths of the canal by the lock gates where Althea
Fenimore's body was found.

It was high June, in leafy England, in a world at peace. Can one
picture it? With such a wrench of memory does one recall scenes of
tender childhood. In the shelter of a stately house lived Althea
Fenimore. She was twenty-one; pretty, buxom, like her mother,
modern, with (to me) a pathetic touch of mid-Victorian softness
and sentimentality; independent in outward action, what we call
"open-air"; yet an anomaly, fond at once of games and babies. I
have seen her in the morning tearing away across country by the
side of her father, the most passionate and reckless rider to
hounds in the county, and in the evening I have come across her, a
pretty mass of pink flesh and muslin--no, it can't be muslin--say