All the candles, save one tottering wick, were dead in their sockets, and the room was filled with lowering phantom-like shadows from oaken floor to grimy vaulted roof beams.  Sir George, hardly conscious of what he did and said, all his evil passions quickened with drink, leaned his hands upon the table and glared across at me.  He seemed to be the incarnation of rage and ferocity, to so great a pitch had he wrought himself.  The sputtering candle feebly flickered, and seemed to give its dim light only that the darksome shadows might flit and hover about us like vampires on the scent of blood.  A cold perspiration induced by a nameless fear came upon me, and in that dark future to which my heated imagination travelled I saw, as if revealed by black magic, fair, sweet, generous Dorothy, standing piteously upon Bowling Green hillside.  Over her drooping form there hung in air a monster cloudlike image of her father holding in its hand a deadly bludgeon.  So black, so horrid was this shadow-demon that I sprang from my chair with a frightful oath, and shrieked:—­

“Hell is made for man because of his cruelty to woman.”

Sir George had sunk into his chair.  Liquor had finished its work, and the old man, resting his head upon his folded arms, leaned forward on the table.  He was drunk—­dead to the world.  How long I stood in frenzied stupor gazing at shadow-stricken Dorothy upon the hillside I do not know.  It must have been several minutes.  Blood of Christ, how vividly I remember the vision!  The sunny radiance of the girl’s hair was darkened and dead.  Her bending attitude was one of abject grief.  Her hands covered her face, and she was the image of woe.  Suddenly she lifted her head with the quick impulsive movement so familiar in her, and with a cry eloquent as a child’s wail for its mother called, “John,” and held out her arms imploringly toward the dim shadowy form of her lover standing upon the hill crest.  Then John’s form began to fade, and as its shadowy essence grew dim, despair slowly stole like a mask of death over Dorothy’s face.  She stood for a moment gazing vacantly into space.  Then she fell to the ground, the shadow of her father hovering over her prostrate form, and the words, “Dead, dead, dead,” came to me in horrifying whispers from every dancing shadow-demon in the room.

In trying to locate the whispers as they reverberated from floor to oaken rafters, I turned and saw Sir George.  He looked as if he were dead.

“Why should you not be dead in fact?” I cried.  “You would kill your daughter.  Why should I not kill you?  That will solve the whole question.”