“You are no longer afraid, Ladygray?  That which you dreaded——­”

“Is dead,” she said.  “And you, John Aldous?  Without knowing, seeing me only as you have seen me, do you think that I am terrible?”

“No, could not think that.”

Her hand touched his arm.

“Will you go out there with me, in the sunlight, where we can look down upon the little lake?” she asked.  “Until to-day I had made up my mind that no one but myself would ever know the truth.  But you have been good to me, and I must tell you—­about myself—­about him.”

He found no answer.  He left no word with MacDonald.  Until they stood on the grassy knoll, with the lakelet shimmering in the sunlight below them, Joanne herself did not speak again.  Then, with a little gesture, she said: 

“Perhaps you think what is down there is dreadful to me.  It isn’t.  I shall always remember that little lake, almost as Donald remembers the cavern—­not because it watches over something I love, but because it guards a thing that in life would have destroyed me!  I know how you must feel, John Aldous—­that deep down in your heart you must wonder at a woman who can rejoice in the death of another human creature.  Yet death, and death alone, has been the key from bondage of millions of souls that have lived before mine; and there are men—­men, too—­whose lives have been warped and destroyed because death did not come to save them.  One was my father.  If death had come for him, if it had taken my mother, that down there would never have happened—­for me!”

She spoke the terrible words so quietly, so calmly, that it was impossible for him entirely to conceal their effect upon him.  There was a bit of pathos in her smile.

“My mother drove my father mad,” she went on, with a simple directness that was the most wonderful thing he had ever heard come from human lips.  “The world did not know that he was mad.  It called him eccentric.  But he was mad—­in just one way.  I was nine years old when it happened, and I can remember our home most vividly.  It was a beautiful home.  And my father!  Need I tell you that I worshipped him—­that to me he was king of all men?  And as deeply as I loved him, so, in another way, he worshipped my mother.  She was beautiful.  In a curious sort of way I used to wonder, as a child, how it was possible for a woman to be so beautiful.  It was a dark beauty—­a recurrence of French strain in her English blood.

“One day I overheard my father tell her that, if she died, he would kill himself.  He was not of the passionate, over-sentimental kind; he was a philosopher, a scientist, calm and self-contained—­and I remembered those words later, when I had outgrown childhood, as one of a hundred proofs of how devoutly he had loved her.  It was more than love, I believe.  It was adoration.  I was nine, I say, when things happened.  Another man, a divorce, and on the day of the divorce this woman, my mother, married her lover.  Somewhere in my father’s brain a single thread snapped, and from that day he was mad—­mad on but one subject; and so deep and intense was his madness that it became a part of me as the years passed, and to-day I, too, am possessed of that madness.  And it is the one greatest thing in the world that I am proud of, John Aldous!”