With an insight which she felt to be terrifying, the Colossus was able to read her thought. To him the human mind was an open page. Looking deep into those honest eyes he smiled at the naked terror that he saw there. With a softness more than feline he began to stroke the delicate fabric of crêpe de chine that so inefficiently covered her. “If I ask you to put your arms about my neck and kiss me, what will you do?” Not by the lips was that speech uttered, but by eyes that glowed and burned like those which glow and burn in jungle grass. She tried again to get away. But with the flick of a paw he cast her back to her cushions and held her. “One can never understand,” he purred with an odd gentleness whose effect upon her was as wine and music, “why a creature of your intelligence, and particularly a woman, should ever truly believe that Right must triumph and Wrong must fail.” “One does believe it, all the same.” His laugh drove the blood from her heart. “And that is so amazing! Look at this horrible world we live in for our sins, and tell me quite honestly if there is any evidence at all of a power more benign than an impersonal, blind, animal force? The wind blows, the clouds rain, the stars shine. Some of us who are geared high smoke big cigars and own newspapers; some of us, geared not so high, are women broken in body and soul, whose daughters are on the streets and whose sons have been condemned by the State to the battue. So much, my dear girl, for this God of yours! On this little planet, you can’t tell me, He is making any headway at all.” She felt as if he had hit her in the face. “I do believe,” she gasped. “And--and--no matter what happens”--his grip was on her shrinking knees--“to me--or to mine--I shall go on believing.” “And I shall go on disbelieving.” He chuckled softly. “All the same, I like your pluck!” The father was speaking again to a favorite daughter. Helen shivered at the intolerable memories wrought by that tone. “How well you fight with your back to the wall.” He raised her hand in his and pressed his lips upon it lightly. “I respect your courage.” Voice and smile grew even more paternal. “And between ourselves, that is the only thing in the life one knows that one does respect. Courage. That alone is sacred. Courage. No matter when, no matter where one meets that, one pays homage.” Smiling at his thoughts, he got up from the sofa on which they sat. As he stood before her in the arrogance of his mental and physical power, she could not kill a sense, try to stifle it as she would, that here perhaps was the noblest thing on which her eyes had looked.