Endor returned icy thanks. With all the aristocrat’s power of defending himself at close quarters, he began to feel that the man opposite was too much for him. “Of course,”--the Colossus was almost like a kitten with a skein of wool--“I shall always owe you a grudge for stealing her from me.” Gentle, half amused as were the words, behind them was a glint of steel. Endor, in spite of a disciplined will, could not resist its challenge. “Not quite a pretty way of putting it,” he said. And there was a nip in his voice. “_Rien qui blesse comme la verité._” The laugh of the Colossus had now a singular lack of music. “Helen Sholto was my right hand, my other self almost. She understood my ways. I don’t know what I shall do without her.” Endor had only a conventional regret to offer for having robbed his enemy of so rare a treasure. He may have felt that the note of lamentation was pitched dangerously high, or again, knowing this man for what he was, he may have been seeking a motive behind it. The Colossus, however, with an odd concentration of voice and eye, went on developing the theme in his own peculiar manner. “She was everything to me,” he said. “Just--everything.” Somehow that husky wheeze put John in mind of a Californian rattler he had heard more than once in his travels. It now struck right home to his heart. “Everything is a big word.” He tried to keep his voice level, but restrain himself as he might he was beginning to see red. “A big word--yes--I agree.” The wheeze became a snarl of subtle contempt. “But in this case it’s the only one you see.” Helen’s lover had an illusion of fangs striking his flesh. “What do you mean?” he demanded with savage eyes. Saul Hartz shrugged contemptuously and spread his hands like a stage Frenchman. In the vain hope of freeing his veins of a poison, Endor repeated a futile question. With a skill, in itself a mockery, his enemy tossed it lightly into the air. “Isn’t it better in some cases,” he said, picking each word with the fetid delicacy of a Baudelaire, “to leave, my dear friend, just a little to the imagination?” The words in the ear of John Endor were those of a devil. He could but gasp. There was no mistaking their implication. Looking squarely across at the man seated in the far corner of the carriage, he saw the image of one capable of doing evil for the love of it. A monster of wickedness confronted him. But in this moment of suffering, his thought was less of the woman he loved than of the country he adored. By what cruel turn of Fate’s shuttle had she, the conqueror of half the world, been conquered by antichrist himself?