Colin went to his room, and let that shutter in his mind rattle up and looked into that lighted window. Between the catastrophe and the coming of the doctor his acuteness had been entirely busy over the account he would be called upon to give, and there his cool ingenuity had served him well: his story had been coherent and consistent, and he had eliminated from it everyone but himself and the dead man, who could bring forward no conflicting testimony. But for the moment he looked only absently at that sensationally decked window, for he congratulated himself on his wisdom in rejecting that wayward thought of taking Dennis with him at midnight, only a little more than an hour ago, into the chapel. If he had done that, what face would Dennis be wearing now? Would he have curled down in bed so quietly and followed his father as he went to the door with the shining of his tranquil, affectionate eyes? Already he knew (and had shuddered to know) that there was in the legend something more than a fairy story, something alive and Satanic from the touch of which he shrank when it came near him. Colin would have told him that what he was to see in the chapel was the worship of that power which through the centuries had so wonderfully befriended the house, and while he quivered in the face of that initiation, there would have come this appalling, this unexpected stroke. The boy would have been distraught with terror; evil which, for its own sake, he must sometime choose as guardian of his soul and body, would have been to him for ever a force that smote its suppliant with death, sudden and terrific. It would have been disastrous if Dennis had seen that. Colin looked into the lighted window. There, vivid as when the scene itself was before his amazed eyes, he scrutinized the image of Vincenzo, already writhing in the ecstasy of possession, and then falling forward like that. Why had that happened? What was its psychical significance? He had died, it appeared, of some shock of terror: panic yelled in his wide silent eyes. Had there come to him some appalling revelation of ultimate absolute evil, even as it had come to old Colin himself when, at his birthday feast, he had shrieked out, “No! No!” and with repelling hands had fallen dead across the table? Or had he looked in the eyes of God, and seen there the infinite love of Him at Whom he mocked?