Again the man stared at him, but now with a look of consternation and pity. "You mean to say you didn't know?" The young man, still leaning against the wall, was unable to speak. A glance at the ashen face convinced the older man that there was no need to repeat the question. "Well, I'm sorry, and I can only apologize," he said, after a moment's pause, and in a tone of good feeling. He then took his hat and coat from the peg, and suddenly darted out of the flat. The door closed after him with a bang. IV The Sailor continued to lean against the wall. An abyss had opened. The look on the face of Mr. Rudge, his late master, and the strange words he had used were returning upon him with awful force. With this discovery came surprise, bewilderment, self-disgust. It hardly seemed possible that a man in his senses could be so blind, so ignorant, so gullible. Where had been his wits, that he should have allowed the creature at the other side of the passage wall, and her associates, to dupe him so completely? As the feeling of amazement at his own folly deepened, a gust of fury swept through him like a storm. An overmastering desire came upon him to enter that room, to deal once and for all with this bird of prey. Let the world be rid of a foul thing. Let his be the hand to efface it in its infamy. He would go in at once and make an end of her. A surge of inherited forces, a flood of old, unhappy, far-off things were whirling him like a piece of driftwood into the maëlstrom. He was in the grip of a terrible power ... a power beyond his control. It was not merely that she had entrapped him, or that he had been incredibly blind to the drab and sordid world in which she lived; in the light of a widening knowledge, the fact which now drove him to frenzy was that a creature so common and unclean should have found it so easy to make him her victim. He did not return to the room at once. There were other forces, it seemed, vibrating in the air around him. There came a sudden reminder from the talisman that he bore continually in the right-hand corner of his brain. He heard a voice. "Henry Harper, is she worth it? Remember, if you destroy her, you destroy yourself utterly, body and soul." The words sank into him. The issue was joined, and there came the shock of battle. A will half wrenched asunder seemed about to be overthrown. The desire to enter the room was overmastering; a sense of duty was reinforced by the passion of revenge. There was madness in the thought that he was the dupe of a common woman of the streets. Shaken with a fury that was awful, he still leaned against the wall of the passage. The voice of the genie was no longer heard. The talisman shone no more. The old, unhappy, far-off things had overwhelmed them. "Kill her, kill her," they whispered savagely. "It is the only thing to do." He was half down already. The forces of destiny were crushing out his life.