Her voice was hardly audible, and she did not move.  Hamilton went down and lifted her to her feet, then supported her to a chair opposite his own.  He made no search for an excuse, for he would not have dared to offer it to this girl, whose spiritual recesses he suddenly determined to probe.  Between her and the dead woman there was a similarity that was something more than superficially atavistic.  His practical brain refused to speculate even upon the doctrine of metempsychosis.  He was like his mother in many ways.  That unique and powerful personality had stamped his brain cells when he was wholly hers.  He recalled that his own soul had echoed faintly with memories in his youth.  What wonder that he had given this inheritance to the most sensitively constituted of his children, whose musical genius, the least sane of all gifts, put her in touch with the greater mysteries of the Universe?  That nebulous memories moved like ghosts in her soul he did not doubt, nor that at such moments she was tormented with vague maternal pangs.  He conquered his first impulse to confess himself to her; doubtless she needed more help than he.  She was staring at him in mingled terror and agony.

“Why do you suffer so when I suffer?” he asked gently; then bluntly, “do you yearn over me as if I were your child, and in peril?”

“Yes,” she answered, without betraying any surprise; “that is it.  I have a terrible feeling of responsibility and helplessness, of understanding and knowing nothing.  I feel sometimes as if I had done you a great wrong, for which I suffer when you are in trouble, and I am no more use to you than John or little Eliza.  If you would tell me.  If you would let me share it with you.  You remember I begged as a child.  You have made believe to tell me secrets many times, but you have told me nothing.  My imagination has nearly shattered me.”

“Do you wish to know?” he asked.  “Are you strong enough to see me as I see myself to-night?  I warn you it will be a glimpse into Hell.”

“I don’t care what it is,” she answered, “so long as it is the reality, and you let me know you as I do underneath my blindness and ignorance.”

Then he told her.  He talked to her as he would have talked to the dead had she risen, although without losing his sense of her identity for a moment, or the consciousness of the danger of the experiment.  He showed her what few mortals have seen, a naked soul with its scars, its stains, and its ravages from flame and convulsion.  He need not have apprehended a disastrous result.  She was compounded of his essences, and her age was that indeterminate mixture of everlasting youth and anticipated wisdom which is the glory and the curse of genius.  She listened intently, the expression of torment displaced by normal if profound sympathy.  He had begun with the passions inspired by Jefferson; he finished with the climax of deterioration in the revenge he had taken on Adams, and the abyss of despair into which it had plunged him.  He drew a long breath of relief, and regarded his little judge with some defiance.  She nodded.