came home to find my mother dead. I was very ill for a long time, and I got out of the habit of seeing people. Then, when my health improved, I began to write. Articles; all sorts of things. Then I was sent out to India to join my regiment, and while I was there I began the book on religions, but for some years I hardly did more than make a beginning. But at last I got so interested in it that when I returned from India I left the army and went to live in a lonely cottage in Cornwall that belonged to my mother. I suppose I allowed the book to become an obsession, as Lady Gregory said, for I spent weeks—months sometimes—without seeing a soul except the village people, and Major Stroud now and then. Then the war came, and until 1919 I was in France. When I came home, I took the flat in Campden Hill. The night . . . the night of the accident, Major Stroud had dragged me out to dine at his club. I remember he had been lecturing me for being such a hermit."
"And rightly," said Judy.
"Still, I should have gone on being a hermit, if you hadn't come just when you did." He paused. "And yet there are people who deny that there's a benevolent Deity who orders our lives."
Captain Stevens might have said that and
