But Crystal did not go at once. She stood in the dark corridor--quite still--watching the stretcher bearers in their careful, silent work, little guessing on what a filmy thread her whole destiny was hanging at this moment. The Fates were spinning, spinning, spinning and she did not know it. Had the solemn silence which hung so ominously in the twilight not been broken till after the sick man had been borne away, the whole of Crystal's future would have been shaped differently. But as with the rain at Waterloo, God had need of a tool for the furtherance of His will and it was Maurice de St. Genis whom He chose--Maurice who with his own words set the final seal to his destiny. De Marmont's eyes as he was being carried over the threshold dwelt upon the graceful form of Crystal--clad all in white--all womanliness and gentleness now--her sweet face only faintly distinguishable in the gloom. St. Genis, whose nerves were still jarred with all that he had gone through to-day and irritated by Crystal's assiduity beside the sick man, resented that last look of farewell which de Marmont dared to throw upon the woman whom he loved. An ungenerous impulse caused him to try and aim a last moral blow at his enemy: "Come, Crystal," he said coldly, "the man has been better looked after than he deserves. But for your father's interference I should have wrung his neck like the cowardly brute that he was." And with the masterful air of a man who has both right and privilege on his side, he put his arm round Crystal's waist and tried to draw her away, and as he did so he whispered a tender: "Come, Crystal!" in her ear. De Marmont--who at this moment was taking a last fond look at the girl he loved, and was busy the while making plans for a happy future wherein Crystal would play the chief rôle and would console him for all disappointments by the magnitude of her love--de Marmont was brought back from the land of dreams by the tender whisperings of his rival. His own helplessness sent a flood of jealous wrath surging up to his brain. The wild hatred which he had always felt for St. Genis ever since that awful humiliation which he had suffered at Brestalou, now blinded him to everything save to the fact that here was a rival who was gloating over his helplessness--a man who twice already had humiliated him before Crystal de Cambray--a man who had every advantage of caste and of community of sympathy! a man therefore who must be in his turn irretrievably crushed in the sight of the woman whom he still hoped to win!