Ah! It was a supreme revenge. They had stolen him from his love and they had stolen his very inmost soul from him. All the agonized prayers which had gone up to God like thin flames had been caught upon their way like tangible and material things, caught by the devilish power of one man, and thrown upon the wall for him to see and laugh over. All his passionate longing for Marjorie, all the messages he tried to frame and send her through the darkness and the walls of stone, all these had been but an amusement and a derision for the fiend whose slave he had become. And all his hatred, his deep cursings of his captor, all his futile half-formed plans for an escape were all known to the two men. And still worse, his very memories, his most sacred memories, had been taken from him and used as a theatre by William Gouldesbrough and Wilson Guest. He understood now the remarks that the assistant had sometimes made, the cruel and extraordinary knowledge he seemed to display of things that had happened in Rathbone's past. It was all quite plain, all terribly distinct. And worst of all, the sacred moments when he had avowed his love for Marjorie, and she, that peerless maiden, had come to him in answer, these dear memories, which alone had kept his cooling mind from madness, were known and exulted over by these men. They had seen him kiss Marjorie; all the endearments of the lovers had passed before them like tableaux in a pantomime. Yes; this indeed was more than any brain could bear. Rathbone knew now that he was going mad. Of course, God never heard his prayers, they could not get up to God. Those beasts had caught them in a net and God never heard them. There had always been that one thought, even in the darkest hour--that thought that God knew and would come to his aid. The face, the rigid face, worked and wrinkled horribly. Ripples of agony passed up and down it like the ripples upon the wind-blown surface of a pool. It was not human now any longer, and the curious and lovers of what is terrible may see such faces in the museum of the mad painter of pictures at Brussels. Then, as a stone falls, consciousness flashed away, though the face still moved and wrinkled automatically. Presently the door of the cell was unlocked, and Wilson Guest came in. He was rather drunk and rather angry also. Sir William had come back from telling Rathbone the truth about what had been done to him and what they proposed to do. Guest had been waiting in the study with great expectation. He congratulated himself on having worked up his patron sufficiently to make him visit Rathbone himself and inform him of his fate. He had not thought that Gouldesbrough could have been brought to do any such thing, and he had awaited his chief's arrival with intense and cynical expectation.