I opened the door, and on the threshold waved my hand in farewell.

"Won't you wait till Elsie comes back?" she asked.

"I will wait for no one."

"But where are you off to?"

I scratched my chin, as one does when one wishes to appear reflective.

"I am going to break the Militant Suffrage Movement."

"A good many people have failed," she warned me.

"They never tried."

"How will you begin?"

I walked downstairs thoughtfully, weighed Dick's tall hat in the balance, and decided in favour of my own.

"I have no idea," I called back to the figure at the stair-head.

The Seraph had marked his confidence in me by the bestowal of a latch-key. I let myself in at Adelphi Terrace and wandered round the flat in search of him. He was not in the library or dining-room, but at length I discovered him in pyjamas sitting in the balcony outside his bedroom, and gazing disconsolately out over the river. He knew where I had been before I had time to tell him, and was able to make a fairly accurate guess at the nature of my conversation with Joyce.

Perhaps there was nothing very wonderful in that, but it fitted in with the rest of his theory: I remember he summarised her mental condition by saying that a certain sub-conscious idea was coming to be consciously apprehended. It was a cumbrous way of saying that both Joyce and I had made rather an important discovery; what puzzled me then, and puzzles me still, is that at my first meeting with her either of us should have given him grounds for forming any theory at all. Even admitting that I may have been visibly impressed, I could see no response in her; but I have almost given up trying to understand the Seraph's mind or mode of thought.

"You've not got her yet," he warned me.

"No one knows that better than I do."

"Her mind's still very full of her cause."

"Yes, damn it."

"Almost as full of it as of you. She's torn between you, and you'll have to fight if you want to keep your foothold."

I told him, as I had told Joyce, that I proposed to break the Suffrage movement.

"How?" he asked.

"I thought you might be able to help. What _is_ going to be the end of it?"

He shook his head moodily, and picked up a cigarette.

"I'm not a prophet."

"You've prophesied to some purpose before now," I reminded him.

He paused to look at me with the cigarette in one hand and a lighted match in the other.

"Guesswork," I heard him murmur.

"But it worked out right?"

"Coincidence."

"_You_ don't think that."

"I may think the world's flat if it amuses me," he answered, blowing out the match.

The abruptness of his tone was unusual.

"What's been worrying you, Seraph?" I asked.

"Nothing. Why?"

I lay back in my chair and looked him up and down.

"You've forgotten to light your cigarette," I pointed out. "You're shaking as if you'd got malaria, and wherever your mind may be, it's not in this room and it's not attending to me."

"I'm sorry," he apologised, sitting down. "I'm rather tired."

To belie his words he jumped up again and began pacing feverishly up and down before the open balcony window.

"Let's hear about it," I urged.

"You can't do any good."

"Let _me_ judge of that."

He paused irresolutely and stood leaning his head against the frame of the window and looking out at the flaming sky-signs on the far side of the river.

"It won't do any good," he repeated over his shoulder. "Nobody 'ud believe you, but--I don't know, you might try. She must be warned.

Sylvia, I mean. She's absolutely on the brink, and if some one doesn't save her, she'll be over. I can't interfere, I should only precipitate it. Will you go, Toby? She might listen to you. It's worth getting your face laid open to keep her out of danger. Will you go?"

He turned and faced me, wild-eyed and excited. His lips were white, and his fingers locked and unlocked themselves in uncontrollable nervous restlessness.

"What's the danger?" I asked, with studied deliberation.

"I don't know. How should I? But it's there; will you go?"

"I don't mind trying," I answered, taking out my watch.

"You must go now!"

It was a quarter to one, and I told him so. Nobody can be less sensitive than I to the charge of eccentricity, but I refuse to disturb a Cabinet Minister's household at one in the morning to proclaim that an overstrung nervous visionary has a premonition that peril of a vague undefined order is menacing the daughter of the house.

"We must wait till Christian hours," I insisted.

"Ah, you don't believe it; no one does!"