The baffled love of half a life-span overcame him. I watched him, almost as shaken. The tyrant of half the world, greater than any man had been since the days when the Caesars reigned, he had bound himself to a more awful law than any he could contrive. It wrung my heart even then, the man’s grim hopes and long enduring love, checked by so slight a chance. “I found Esther was gone,” continued Sanson presently, rising and beginning to pace the vault. “I might have re-entered my cylinder, but I did not know whether she survived in hers. I knew my ambitions claimed me, and my duty to save humanity and raise it up from the ape. Even she had to yield to that sacred and pitiful impulse. I learned soon that the cylinder which contained her had been discovered and adopted as a symbol of freedom. I found the world aflame and flung myself into the heart of the revolution. By will I made myself the master of men. In six months my dominance was unquestioned. I could have become supreme, but I chose to work through others, that I might have the leisure to devote myself to my plans for the regeneration of man. I have succeeded; I have made the world better, Arnold, and I have made it free. But now, when at last the reward of my long toil approaches, when at last I can show Esther what I have achieved for her, and lay the world at her feet, I am an old man, and the prize has turned to ashes.” His grief conquered him again, and he paced the vault like a madman, weeping with all the abandonment of one who is above the need of conventional repressions. I remembered the antics of the crowd that followed me to the court. Sanson’s grief was as unrestrained as their malice. But I was brought back from pity by the realization of this new and dreadful complication. Sanson loved Esther still. And he had worked for her. I recalled her immature feminist views. He had believed her youthful impatience of authority rested upon as firm a conviction as his beliefs! He thought he had freed humanity. And all the uncountable wrongs of earth had been heaped up by him as a love-offering to lay at Esther’s feet. I flung my prudence away. I clasped him by the hands. “Sanson,” I pleaded, “don’t you see, don’t you understand what the world is today? Each age has its own cruelties and wrongs; but, if poverty has been abolished, have you not set a heavier yoke upon men’s necks? Their children torn from them, the death-house for the old, the vivisection table—”