“It was through me that Constantine died. I saw him torn to pieces. I heard his last cry. Would you have me eternally branded with a crime?” Were it not for the tragic consequences of her decision, I could have smiled at this despairing effort to divert me from the track of the shadowy truth I was pursuing. “You know full well that Constantine paid the penalty of the heedless man who touches a live wire,” I protested. “You must blame his folly, not the relentless force which he incredulously despised. Come, now, Miss Hutchinson, I have said sufficient to prove to you that one other in the world, besides you and Karl, has probed the depths of the enigma which has terrified you for years. You are a woman to-day, not the timid girl who first saw visions on board the _Merlin_, and you have all a woman’s capacity for boundless love. The fight and the dread are ended. You must come with me to Karl, and all will be well.” Going back to-day to the memories of that astounding scene, when I, to rescue my friend, flung prudence and a great many other wise restraints to the winds, I am guiltily conscious that the possible effect on Nora Cazenove of a marriage between Karl and Maggie did not weigh greatly in the scale of my argument. A man who sees a ghost may be pardoned if he uses certain extravagant expressions and entertains one-sided views on the subject of specters. I was nearer to the mysterious essence of telegnomy than I knew. Here, in the actual presence of the fair creature who was symbolic of the everlasting revivification of nature, I was carried out of myself, rapt to the skies in a mystical mood of awestricken exaltation. “My heart was hot within me, and while I was thus musing the fire kindled.” I seemed to be hovering on the very lip of knowledge. That which is sown in weakness and raised in power, sown a natural body and raised a spiritual body--that which men loosely style eternity--was clothing its enduring divinity with the perishable garments of earth. How long I stood there, dazed with the immensity of this new intellectual horizon, I know not. The need of further speech had gone. Maggie, clasping her hands on her knees, was gazing at me with eyes which saw not, and I was waiting as though for some dread sentence which should snap invisible chains of wondrous strength, when a great change came over her face. From abounding melancholy her aspect altered to that of transfixed horror. She sprang from the chair in which she was sitting and caught my arm with the tenacious strength of partial dementia. “It is too late!” she muttered in a terrible voice. “Steindal has murdered Karl! And I, too, have helped to kill him! Oh, may Heaven forgive me!” She herself sank as one dead. I held her while I cried in a frenzy for help. The wonder is that I did not collapse by her side. CHAPTER XXIV THE FALL OF THE CURTAIN