"You knew me well enough yesterday to be reasonably certain of what I would do in given circumstances, didn't you, Patricia?" he began abruptly. "To-day you are not so sure about it. Why?" She laughed lightly, but there was a serious undernote in her voice when she said: "There are moments when you make me wonder if you haven't been dabbling in necromancy, Evan. I was at that very instant telling myself that it wasn't so." "But you know it is so," he persisted. "Why am I different?" "I don't know." "Yet you recognize the fact?" "Is it a fact?" she queried. "Yes." "In what way are you different?" "I am not altogether certain that I know, myself. But I do know this: between yesterday and to-day there is a gulf so wide that it seems measureless. The scientists claim there are no cataclysms; no sudden and sweeping changes taking place either in the physical or the metaphysical field. If that be true, the changes must go on subconsciously for a long time before they are recognized. There is no other way of accounting for the gulfs." "You are talking miles over my head," she protested; and, though the assertion was not strictly true, it served its purpose. "I can make it a little plainer," he went on, slowing the motor until the small car was merely ambling. "You remember that night at Wartrace Hall, and what you told me? I went out from that talk resolved to do what you had shown me I ought to do, stubbornly refusing to consider the possibility of failure. None the less, I have failed." "Oh, no!" she exclaimed; "not that!" "Yes, just that. But the failure is not the worst thing that has befallen me. I have lost or gained something that pushes the yesterdays into a past which can never be recovered. Let me tell you, girl: I have been fighting in the open, against treachery and deceit fighting always under cover. I have been fighting bare-handed where others were armed. Day by day I have been finding out the baseness and the trickery; how my own side has used me as a screen behind which the old dishonorable expedients could be safely planned and carried out. I never knew until within the past two days what all this chicanery and double-dealing might be doing to me, but now I do know." "Will it bear telling?" she asked quietly. "I think not--to you," he returned, matching her low tone. "Let it be enough to say that I am no longer the man I was when I came out here. Patricia, I'm not fighting bare-handed any more; I'm smashing in with any weapon I can get hold of. There will be no such reform as the one you urged me to champion--as the era of fair-dealing and sincerity which I have been trying honestly and earnestly to inaugurate. Nevertheless, if my hand doesn't tremble too much at the critical moment, there will be, on the morning of next Tuesday, such a revolution as this commonwealth has never seen. Though they have robbed me and made a puppet of me, I can still bring it about."