And yet there was something real: misery and poverty were real. He had felt them, wrestled with them hand to hand; and now he was too weak to fight them again, too delicate, too refined! He _would_ not face them again. Then, leaning back with his pallid head resting against the cushioned back of his chair, his deep-set black eyes clouded With the venom of these reflections, he was aware of a gentle; pleasant electric current thrilling through him--a current of Will. Fatality had willed to bring Frank and Eva together; well, he--a mere plaything of Fate--would will, that-- Yes. He would will to part them. And before his very eyes, as it seemed, that purpose rose up, cold and rigid, an evil and mysterious form, like an incarnation of Satanic malignity. It looked at him with the eye of a Sybil, of a Sphinx; and, as compared with the Titanic cruelty of that image, his former visions sank into nothingness--the Dance of Death of the years, the continuity of Fatality, and his cursing of it all. These now vanished, and he only saw that figure, like a ghost, almost tangible and almost visibly solid in the dusk, against the dying glow of the fire. The gloomy, questioning gaze of those eyes hypnotised his soul; his instinct fell asleep under its crushing power.... Friendship! gratitude! They, too, were mere words. There was nothing real in life but conventionality and--poverty. And then there was that image--there, in front of the fire--with its staring, fixed gaze, petrified to an embodiment of silent, irresistible, infernal magnetism! II