Again he shook himself together. If the boy could speak, it was time to question him. He had not yet seen his face, beyond a flashing imprint on his brain of a look of terrific fear and terrific exultation as it had dashed past him, but he was prepared to like it. He braced himself, walked over and stood in front of the chair. With an object--even this object--to justify it, he gladly surrendered himself now to the fatherly instinct he had so bitterly struggled against, and he felt that he would like, with his first words, to put his hand reassuringly on the crumpled shoulder. But the night had left his nerves still raw--in his sensitivity he could not bear the thought that the trembling figure would shrink from his touch, and he kept his hand firmly at his side. "My boy," he said gently, "you mustn't be afraid of me. Tell me what you've done." The young man raised his head, sank back in the chair, and looked at him. Not once in the long evening of lonely terror, not when he had first heard himself talking aloud, not when he had dashed at his wife's portrait, not when he had faced the thought of madness, had Mr. Montagu had such a shock. An eternally lost soul, a damned thing staring at paradise, seemed to gaze at him out of the boy's eyes. He thought he was seeing all the sins of the world in them, yet the look was appallingly innocent. He seemed to be discovering those sins in the dark, ravening eyes, but to be feeling them in himself as if the forgotten, ignored innermost of his own life were quaking with guilt under the spell of this staring presence. In the state of horrified sympathy to which it had precipitated him, he morbidly felt almost responsible for the brooding evil in the boy as well as aghast at it. But even this sense of sin, implying as it did a skeleton of naked, primal right and wrong seemed of small import to his astounded mind beside the nameless, unmentionable sorrow that pervaded the face and stabbed at Henry Montagu's heart. He knew without question that he was looking at tragedy--worse than he had supposed the world could hold or any human thing, in any world, be subject to. It was a man's face in every line and poise and suggestion, but for all its frightful knowledge he had to call it beautiful--the clear-cut word "handsome" ran away from it like a mouse into a hole, leaving it a superb horror that, as soon as his paralyzed muscles could respond to his instinct, drove his hand to his face to shut away the deliberate, searching gaze. "Done?" answered the young fellow at last. "What have I done? _Good God!_" For the third time, it was one of his own three exclamations totally new to him that night, and the coincidence drove home to him, this time, with a sense of omen. But his guest was speaking again, and, forcing himself to look calmly at the tragic face he listened breathlessly.