But then over him swept the same blur of jealousy that had resulted in Graehme Stewart’s undoing.  This youth wooed his daughter; he had won her affections away.  Strangely enough Galen Albret confused the new and the old; again youth cleaved to youth, leaving age apart.  Age felt fiercely the desire to maintain its own.  The Factor crushed the silver match-box between his great palms and looked up.  His daughter lay before him, still, lifeless.  Deliberately he rested his chin on his hands and contemplated her.

The room, as always, was full of contrast; shafts of light, dust-moted, bewildering, crossed from the embrasured windows, throwing high-lights into prominence and shadows into impenetrable darkness.  They rendered the gray-clad figure of the girl vague and ethereal, like a mist above a stream; they darkened the dull-hued couch on which she rested into a liquid, impalpable black; they hazed the draped background of the corner into a far-reaching distance; so that finally to Galen Albret, staring with hypnotic intensity, it came to seem that he looked upon a pure and disembodied spirit sleeping sweetly—­cradled on illimitable space.  The ordinary and familiar surroundings all disappeared.  His consciousness accepted nothing but the cameo profile of marble white, the nimbus of golden haze about the head, the mist-like suggestion of a body, and again the clear marble spot of the hands.  All else was a background of modulated depths.

So gradually the old man’s spirit, wearied by the stress of the last hour, turned in on itself and began to create.  The cameo profile, the mist-like body, the marble hands remained; but now Galen Albret saw other things as well.  A dim, rare perfume was wafted from some unseen space; indistinct flashes of light spotted the darknesses; faint swells of music lifted the silence intermittently.  These things were small and still, and under the external consciousness—­like the voices one may hear beneath the roar of a tumbling rapid—­but gradually they defined themselves.  The perfume came to Galen Albret’s nostrils on the wings of incensed smoke; the flashes of light steadied to the ovals of candle flames; the faint swells of music blended into grand-breathed organ chords.  He felt about him the dim awe of the church, he saw the tapers burning at head and foot, the clear, calm face of the dead, smiling faintly that at last it should be no more disturbed.  So had he looked all one night and all one day in the long time ago.  The Factor stretched his arms out to the figure on the couch, but he called upon his wife, gone these twenty years.

“Elodie!  Elodie!” he murmured, softly.  She had never known it, thank God, but he had wronged her too.  In all sorrow and sweet heavenly pity he had believed that her youth had turned to the youth of the other man.  It had not been so.  Did be not owe her, too, some reparation?

As though in answer to his appeal, or perhaps that merely the sound of a human voice had broken the last shreds of her swoon, the girl moved slightly.  Galen Albret did not stir.  Slowly Virginia turned her head, until finally her wandering eyes met his, fixed on her with passionate intensity.  For a moment she stared at him, then comprehension came to her along with memory.  She cried out, and sat upright in one violent motion.