The letter broke off, and ended with the scrawled initials “Yrs., R. C.” and an undecipherable postscript: “Don’t tell Vi.” Had he been called away hurriedly by the falling shell which had buried his men? The envelope was addressed in another writing. She felt it must have been so. Very swiftly he had followed the man who had died cursing him and his, out into the world where thought and emotion, unclogged by this physical matter, are so much the more powerful and uncontrolled. Had they met, these two strong spirits, moving on different lines of force, working for different ends? What had been let loose when Karl von Schäde had died in that British clearing station, cursing “England and the English, me and mine and Thorpe. Even Vi.” The great emotional forces, so much greater than the physical body which imprisons them, what power was there when freed; this hatred in a man of great and cultivated intellect, whose aim had been no mean or contemptible thing, whose aim had been power, what was that force on the other side of death? How much could it accomplish if, with added knowledge, it so willed? Ruth shivered in the warm June night. A sense of danger to the farm stole over her. A warning of something sinister, impending, brooding, as the great thunder-cloud had loomed up before it burst. She stepped out over the low window-ledge on to the terrace, looked across the sleeping beauty before her. Still she held the papers in her hand. A glimmering moon was rising behind the trees, a little faint wind whispered among the leaves. They made black patterns on the silvered grass as it moved them very gently. The wind fell, and with it a great stillness. And out of the stillness came to Ruth Seer a Word. She went back into the sitting-room, dark now except for the light of the little lamp, and knelt before it, and prayed. And her prayer was just all the love and the pity she could gather into her heart for the strong spirit that had gone out black, and bitter, and tortured, and filled with hate. The spirit that had been Karl von Schäde. CHAPTER X