Never did a nice young man carry out an harder self-imposed ordeal with a nice young woman than Hooper that evening in his impassioned plea to Nora Cazenove for his friend’s life. “I never let up on her for an instant,” he said in his own picturesque way. “We had a heart-to-heart talk. The storming of San Juan Hill was child’s play to the way in which I hurled my battalions of fact against her entrenchments of romance. When I pictured Karl’s impending collapse, the inconsolable despair of his parents, her own unending self-reproach, and even the broken-hearted sorrow of her successful rival, I got her to the point of yielding. I pitied her for her suffering, but I promised her the reward of the consciousness of having acted nobly. She, and Karl, and Maggie, were the victims of circumstances. They could no more help what had happened than moths driven out to sea by a summer hurricane. One of them must let go for the good of all. If she renounced Karl voluntarily, there was a chance, and perhaps only a remote chance, that a tragedy might be averted. I could not guarantee that. But it was the one way out, in your judgment and mine, while her marriage with Karl was simply not to be thought of, because he would be dead within a week.” Think of this strenuous advocate piling Pelion upon Ossa to scale the fortress of a woman’s fierce love, asking her to believe the incredible, to sacrifice herself, not only for the sake of the man she worshiped, but to secure the happiness of another woman! And yet, he nearly won. Of that he was certain. He kept until the last the fact that Karl was even then lying in the hotel, weary almost unto dissolution, utterly spent by the struggle which he had waged in her behalf. It seemed to him that the intensity of his convictions had borne down the barrier Karl himself had erected in Nora’s heart and brain. She was on the point of yielding. The words trembled on her lips which would set Karl free, but the dénouement came in a fashion which neither of them expected. Hitherto she had been greatly distressed, yet the exigencies of the time and place restrained her protests to the spoken word, the flashing eye, the tremulous lip. Suddenly she rose to her feet and staggered back into the dark interior of the box. Had not Hooper caught her in his arms she would have fallen. “Oh, take me home, take me home!” she wailed. “For pity’s sake, do not leave me! Karl is dead!” CHAPTER XXIII “A STRUGGLE ’TWIXT LOVE AND DEATH”