A figure stood before me.  The old fascination in the eyes; a soul burning with lofty enthusiasm looked through and kindled them.  But the face,—­it was ghastly, livid as the face of a leper:  it was spectral,—­blanched and dried with the white flames of his exalted vigils.  Ah, black eyes, well may you shine in terrible triumph!  The old idolatry this man demanded of me would not be repelled.  I gazed upon my visitor as upon a phantom from another sphere, and knew no reckoning of time.  His magnetism was upon me; I could only crouch into myself—­and wait.  At length the silence was broken.

“Charles Clifton, teacher of the people, listen that you may be taught!  For the last time I have come down into your world of passion and sense.  The impulses with which you vainly strive and wrestle are behind me.  Alone, alone, I have risen from the abysmal depths of personality.  I have struggled fiercely.  I have also conquered.”

The livid face showed no change.  It suddenly came to me, that, by some voluntary disfigurement of his exquisite beauty of feature, this man had cut away the lusts for pleasure, fame, and influence.  What woman would kiss that ghastly cheek?  What sycophant could fawn and smirk in that chilly presence?  The injunctions concerning the offending eye and hand Vannelle had interpreted literally.

“I hold,” he continued, “the noble prize of intellectual satisfaction seized by effort.  Multiply the self-satisfactions of earth by infinity, and you may guess a little of the sublime contentment which wraps me round!  Does the best stage-trick of your liberal clergy help them to anything but a plasticity of mind to be moulded into artistic forms of skepticism?  How can you feel the delight of a definite, positive affirmation which accounts for and includes all creeds and lives of men?  How can you come out from your partial dogmas to enter Truth and find it alone dogmatic and compulsive?  Clifton, I pity you.  I would rescue you from this haze of thought and feeling,—­I, who have even now discarded Intelligence and enthroned Wisdom.”

“I hope to be pardoned,” I said,—­“the current of this life sets so in favor of Utility and the Practical; men long to be fed with sentiment,—­why try to give them ideas?”

“Fulfil, then, forever your little round of decencies and proprieties,” exclaimed Vannelle; “I judge you not.  Perchance your weakness is the pardonable weakness of one who has done his best.  You may be guiltless in failing to attain the strength, the glory, of a true conviction.”

“Is it too late?” I asked, faintly.

“It is the question I must put to you,” replied Herbert.  “I bring you in this manuscript the result of my life,—­the result of two lives.  Here is written, as clearly as can be written in gross symbols of human language, that which may suggest the Absolute, the Alpha and Omega, the System, not humanly built upon hypothesis, but divinely founded upon Law.”