"You are quite right," he went on, when the other's glass had been filled again, "Mr. Vane's conduct has been most scandalous of late. You say he has a mirror?" All circumspection had long since passed from Nevins. He was simply an individual with a grievance. The many episodes that, in his filmy mind, seemed to center about that mirror, shifted and twisted in him to where they forced utterance. He began to talk, circuitously, wildly, rapidly, of the many things that rankled in him. He told all he knew, all he had observed. From out of the mass of inane, not pertinent ramblings, Moncreith caught a glimmer of the facts. What a terrible power this must be that was in Orson Vane's possession! Moncreith shuddered at the thought. Why, the man might turn himself, in all but externals--and what, after all, was the husk, the shell, the body?--into the finest wit, the most lovable hero of his time; he might fare about the world wrecking now this, now that, happiness; he might win--perhaps he actually had, even now, won Jeannette Vanlief? If he had, if--perhaps there was yet time! There was need for sharp, desperate action. He plunged out of the place and toward Vanthuysen Square. Then he remembered that he could not get in. He aroused Nevins from his brutish doze. He dragged him over the intervening space. Nevins gave him the key, and dropped into one of the hall chairs. Moncreith leaped upstairs, and entered the room where the mirror stood, white, silent, stately. He contemplated everything for a time. He conjured up the picture he had been able to piece together from the rambling monologues of Nevins. He wondered whether to simply smash in the mirrors--he would destroy them all, to make sure--by taking a chair-leg to them, or whether he would carefully pour some acid over them. The simpler plan appealed most to him. It was the quickest, the most thorough. He took a little wooden chair that stood by an ebon escritoire, swung it high in the air and brought it with a shattering crash upon the face of the Professor's mirror. But there was more than a mere crash. A deadly, sickening, stifling fume arose from the space the clinking glass unbared; a flame burst out, leaped at Moncreith and seized him. The deadly white smoke flowed through the room; flame followed flame, curtains, hangings, screens went, one after the other, to feed the ravenous beast that Moncreith's blow had liberated. The room was presently a seething furnace that rattled in the cage of the walls and windows. Moncreith lay, choked with the horrid smoke, on the floor. The flames licked at him again and again; finally one took him on the tip of its tongue, twisted him about, and shriveled him to black, charred shapelessness. The windows fell, finally, out upon the street below. The fire sneaked downward, laughing and leaping. When the firemen came to save Orson Vane's house, they found a grinning, sodden creature in the hall.