She looked at him calmly. "It is more than a few hours old," she said. "Do you think I don’t know? What I first saw in you I have watched grow ever since. I told you all I could; it was not for me to help you more. It was for you to help yourself—to develop from within. I think you were all ready for me, and I came at the psychological moment." She looked around the room from which the sunlight had now retreated, leaving it shadowy and dim. The hangings of black velvet were scattered about the floor, the little table and its two chairs were like a group of skeletons, empty, satiric, suggestive of past vanities. "’What is to come is real; it was a dream that passed,’" she quoted. He found a new courage and a new hope. It shone in his eyes, it tingled in his body; something of his old audacity returned. He stood dark and strong before her. "Oh, you have helped, indeed!" he said. "I think this would never have come alone, for I was sunk in an apathy—and yet, I’m not sure. The old life was no longer possible. I confess that I was in a trap, threatened with exposure—I feared your discovery of what I had been—I smarted under the shame of your disapproval—but it was not that that influenced me. It was like a chemical reaction, as all human intercourse is; you precipitated all this deceit and hypocrisy at one stroke and left my mind clear." "I’m so glad you feel it that way," Clytie said. "It brings us together, doesn’t it? It lessens the debt you would owe me." Her eyelids crinkled in a delicious expression of humor, as she added, "And it makes this place seem a little less like a Sunday-school room!" "Oh, I suppose many a man has refused to reform for fear of being considered a prig!" he laughed. "But I haven’t swept out all the corners yet. I must finish cleaning house before I invite you in." "Why should we talk about it any more?" "But it isn’t all over!" he exclaimed. "I haven’t told everything. It’s all over, so far as I am concerned—I shall not go back—but now you are involved in it. Could anything drag me lower than that?" "What do you mean?" she asked. "Only that, because of my fault in not warning you before, your father has already become the latest dupe for this gang of fakirs. I’m afraid he’s in their power. Hasn’t he told you anything about it?" "A little. What is there to fear from them?" "Of course, it’s only his money they’re after. They have got hold of considerable information about him—I don’t know just how or what—and they have succeeded in hoodwinking him into a belief that they have supernatural powers. I’m afraid it’s no use for me to attempt to expose them. He’d never believe anything I could say." "No, that’s useless. He has taken a violent prejudice against you, for some reason."