Enistor lay in bed, propped up with many pillows. Other than a shaded lamp on a small table beside him, there was no illumination save the crimson glimmer of the fire, so that the room was filled with a kind of artificial twilight, sinister and eerie. It was a large apartment furnished in that heavy cumbersome style prevalent during the first half of the last century, eminently comfortable but markedly inartistic. The green rep curtains of the bed were looped back to show the white suffering face and sunken eyes of the sick man, on whom the gaze of the quartette was centred. The silence was intense; as the rain had ceased, the wind had died away, and only the heavy breathing of those present, or the fall of a burning coal, broke the stillness. This calm before the storm suggested itself to Alice as much more terrible than the storm itself could possibly be. It seemed as though the whole of creation waited anxiously to hear what choice the dying man would make between evil and good. The words came slowly from him, as he fixed his weary eyes on Montrose with wondering inquiry. "Why did you save my life?" he asked. "I was sorry for you." "Sorry for one who intended to have you hanged for a crime you did not commit. Impossible!" "That I saved you showed it was not impossible. I had a struggle: oh, yes, I had a great struggle. Not knowing that my character would be cleared, I nearly decided to let you perish lest you should condemn me. But I could not: I could not." "Why?" demanded Enistor insistently. "Why? Why?" Montrose pressed his hands tightly together to control his emotions. "How can I explain? Something higher than my ordinary self acted for me." "The Christ, Who is building Himself up within you, spoke," said Eberstein gravely. "Weakness spoke," struck in the magician. "The weakness of a coward who was afraid to remove an obstacle from his path." "Montrose did remove an obstacle," said the doctor, addressing Narvaez-Hardwick for the first time. "One which was blocking his upward path." "His murder of me in Chaldea?" questioned Enistor, after a pause. "Yes! He owed you a life. Only by giving back in another way what he had robbed you of could he learn his lesson and cleanse his soul." "Where is the life that has been given?" sneered Narvaez-Hardwick. "There is Enistor dying. A valuable gift indeed." "Montrose did not know that Enistor was fatally injured by his fall. So far as he was aware he gave back what he had taken and at the risk of losing his present life unjustly. The sheet is clean." "Sophistry! Sophistry! You are trying to make black white." "Not so. Man is judged by his intention in whatever he does. Thought precedes both words and acts, so if the first be right the two last cannot be wrong." "We are here to listen to a sermon, it appears," said the other man mockingly. "You are woefully dull."