“Mildred,” I whispered, “what would this man do, enamored of his morning, his first morning ... what would he do, if there was danger that the morning go, ere he had more than glimpsed it?” I raised my eyes slowly. She was looking at me. Her eyes did not stir, meeting mine. It was as if they had begun to see a thing within me, and were rapt in that deep focus. “Mildred,” I whispered, “all this that I know and that I tell you now, I have known only since last I saw you. My mind strove, you know how purely, to make great my will. It worked better, O terribly better than I knew. For at the end, my will became so masterful that it ceased to consult my mind. How long it had been this masterful monstrous thing, I cannot say. But when there was danger that the dawning sun go or be clouded: then it worked. And only after what anguish of search, did I learn what it had done!” She looked with her deep still gaze within me. Upon her eyes a faint glaze gleamed and it was hard, this surface of her eyes, hard and defensive: not like her eyes at all. I talked as if to pierce this glaze, as if to melt it. “Perhaps from the beginning my will worked and made a fool of my mind ... a slave and a fool. Perhaps it was preparing from the first day, for you. Do you think that could be? And all my labors in science seeking the truth, all the chaste rigors of my life ... do you think perhaps these were blind ways for the working of my will ... plotting for you, wanting to possess you? “For when I saw you, I wanted to possess you. And since I saw so deep, that was a sin. The shallow man may dare to possess. But your body was not enough for me: nor your mind, nor your love. Oh, I wanted them! But I beheld in you what no man can possess. Your mysterious power--the wisdom of your beauty which is so great that it has no words, that it disdains your mind. I wanted to possess that, above all. By equaling it--I with my plodding mind of words and concepts! I became mad in love of your beauty: I wanted to possess, by equaling your beauty. “Mildred, I must tell you everything. There is a brutal strain in my will. And when the end that it would win is brutal, it does not tell my mind. For my mind is not brutal. “Mildred, there were obstacles in the way of my will to my life’s final need; obstacles to you. For you must be mine perfectly. Even my mind agreed in that, and suffered.” Her hand was motionless in mine. It was like a sleeping thing. “I killed Philip LaMotte, who was in the way of my will.” Her eyes seemed to be drawing forward from their distant focus to my mouth, as if what they had seen before within was now articulate there. “My will killed the man whom my eyes had never seen, whose name I did not know, nor whose existence until you told me he was dead. My mind knows that, now.” I could not bear her hand, this dead thing in my own. I could not let it go.