“Didn’t you see how he suffered from self-reproach? Don’t you realize that he still is suffering?” She sighed in her voice of sad winds. “Surely you gathered from the picture that all those age-long minutes of the time I died from doubt, he still loved me--that he loves me now? I want to implore his forgiveness.” Her smile, timid from its rarity, strained to disappear, although she tried to hold it. “I’ve done my best to please you,” she wheedled nervously. “Won’t you do this for me--just free my spirit for one short hour by the time of Earth?” “So! You’d rather go back to that puny mortal than on and on--with me?” “Oh, but I’ll come back, and go on and on so cheerfully! I give you my word,” she assured him. “I’ll do everything I can for you. Just grant me the hour. It’s not the fraction of a second to you. You say that you never have cared for anyone. Yet you boast of your imagination. Can’t you imagine what it is really to care? Won’t you even try?” “I might do that.” He eyed her. “I might try.” All the drive home his manner was detached. He did not repulse her gratitude for his grudging consideration of her request. Neither did he explain that he was trying to imagine what “caring” would be like--but trying through jealousy, its crudest mood. “I will tell you--well, afterward,” he said, on bidding her “sleep light” within Apollyon Palace. “After what?”--she. “That I don’t know myself as yet,” he snapped. Afterward--if only we could know the afterward before! She slept light. And through the next day her regret increased that she had not dared his wrath and demanded a definite period to her suspense. Feelings unwontedly rebellious filled her that she must wait to know--rather, that John must wait. Over the babe--their babe--she crooned her hope. To Adeline she whispered her apprehension. Something in the hard, planning look of the unfair fiend, in his superiority to any attempt at cleverness, in his abstraction even while listening to compliments over his driving---- _When_ was afterward? * * * * * Satan, too, asked himself questions through that day. A far busier leader than any king or president of Earth, since he had the evil of all nations to direct, he yet found time from his activities to remember the boomerang blow to himself of last night’s “show.” His chamber of state glowed as with St. Elmo’s fire, while he lightning-flashed his orders through infinity, defying the “static” of Earth and Heaven and the void between. Piteously he drove his Minions of Malice toward the consummation of crimes unique or foul enough to merit his supervision. No measurement exists to compute the watts of energy required to transmit the royal will in this orgy of action. But what did he care that the Gehennan sun was dimmed by the draught until it looked a mere balloon?