Helen rose rather nervously from her chair. She was never quite at her ease in this man’s presence. Few were. Before she could muster wits enough to say anything, Saul Hartz had gone on developing his theme in the hushed, far-away voice which only one person at a time was ever able to hear and yet in the ear of that person every syllable was like a bell. “Madness in the mother’s family. Got his _dossier_--dear fellow! Brilliant at Oxford. At Eton, too. Geared a little too high, just a little too high--that’s all. Great pity! A second Gladstone might have been so useful just now. But”--the shrug of the Colossus almost seemed in the tranced eyes of Helen to set the cosmos whirling--“over the verge already. Dear fellow!” The finality of that gentle, rather eerie voice turned her soul faint. She could not repress a shudder. The sense of fate as adumbrated in the personality of this man was overpowering. “Dear fellow!” He developed his theme with a cadence ever-recurring, yet of a slightly fantastic irrelevance, like a _leit-motif_ of the later Wagner. “You’ve seen his speech, I daresay, to his constituents. Proud people--they must be--dear fellow! Mother, you know, was one of the mad Dinneford lot.” So intense was his absorption in his subject that it might be said to evoke an atmosphere. The room itself became submerged in a miasma that was almost deadly. Helen had a sensation of being stifled by a lurking, unknown force. It was very difficult to interpose a word. By the time she was able to do so, mischief had been wrought. “Don’t you wonder why I’m here,” she said, “at this hour?” “To own the _Planet_,” he laughed, “is to wonder at nothing.” “I want your help in a matter of great importance.” “Aha!” There came at once an entire change of tone and manner that was charming. “Sit down again in that chair, and tell me just precisely what I can do.” Of a sudden he had put on the cloak of an indulgent father. When he spoke like that to any one, there was no resisting him. Helen automatically obeyed. “It’s about Mr. Endor’s speech.” She plunged in _medias res_. With those eyes, their light ever changing, fixed upon her, she lost the power to order her words artistically. “I have his assurance that he has been misreported.” “Ah!” The slight exclamation was curiously, almost affectionately, gentle. “He’s so upset!” A feminine urgency of tone was the oddest contrast. “Almost every word he used has in some strange way been given another meaning. For instance, the final phrase as given in the _Evening Press_ is ‘I believe in the Sword.’” “Yes, I noticed that.” The tone had all the kindliness of an old-fashioned pedagogue patting on the head a favorite pupil. “A little bold perhaps just now, but striking ... really quite striking!” “But it was never used. What he did say was, ‘I believe in the Word.’”