"I have been looking into it since. I wanted to throw Karl's results to the right man. He was head and shoulders above them all." There was a slow closing of her eyes, but she was not shrinking from him now;--this the kind of hurt she was able to bear. "If he had been left to work out his life--" but he stopped, brought suddenly to a sense of how far he had lost himself. She too saw it. "Dr. Parkman,"--with a smile which put him far from her--"_this_ is what you came to say? You think _I_ need any incitement? You needn't, Dr. Parkman,"--with rising passion--"you needn't. Every time I leave this room two things are different. I have more love for Karl--more hate for his destroyers. And those two passions will feed upon me to the end of my life!" Instinctively he put out a protesting hand. It was too plain that it was as she said. "More love for Karl--more hate for his destroyers,"--she repeated it with a passionate steadfastness as though it comprehended the creed of her life. "His--destroyers?" he faltered. "What do you mean--by that?" And she answered, with a directness before which dissembling and evasion crumbled away: "Read the answer in your own heart. "And if you cannot look into your own heart," she went on, unsparingly, "if your own heart has been shut away so long that it is closed even to yourself, then look into your looking-glass and read the answer there. Let the grey hairs in your own head, the lines in your own face,--yes, the words of your own mouth--tell you what you would know of Karl's destroyers." He drew in his lips in that way of his; one side of his face twitched uncontrollably. He had come to reach her soul, reach it if must be through channels of suffering. He had not thought of her reaching his like this. But she could not stop. "And if you want to know what I have gone through, look back to what you have gone through yourself--then make some of those hours just as much stronger as love is stronger than friendship--and perhaps you can get some idea of what it has been to me!" He was dumb before that. Putting it that way there was not a word to say. He saw now the real change. It was more than hollowed cheeks and eyes from which the light of other days had gone, more than soft curves surrendered to grief and youth eaten out by bitterness. It was a change at the root of things. A great tide had been turned the other way. But in the days when happiness softened her and love made it all harmonious he had never felt her force as he felt it now. Reach this? Turn this? The moment brought new understanding of the paltriness of words. It was she who spoke. "Dr. Parkman,"--looking at him with a keenness in which there was almost an affectionate understanding--"you did not say what you intended to say when you came into this room. You intended to speak of me--but the room swept you back to Karl. Oh--I know. And it is just because you _were_ swept back--care like this--that I am going to tell you something.