As for Olga, she stood a moment, as one stunned past all feeling; then turned from him and moved away.  “So it was—­your doing,” she said, in a curious, stifled voice as if she were scarcely conscious of speaking at all.

He did not answer her.  The words scarcely demanded an answer.

She reached the table unsteadily, and sat down, leaning her elbow upon it, her chin on her hand.  Her eyes gazed right away down far vistas unbounded by time or space.

“It isn’t the first time, is it?” she said.  “You did it once before.  I suppose—­” her voice dropped still lower; she seemed to be speaking to herself—­“as a Keeper of the Door, you think you have the right.”

“Will you tell me what you mean?” he said.

She did not turn her head.  She still gazed upon invisible things.  “Do you remember poor old Mrs. Stubbs?  You helped her, didn’t you, in the same way?”

“I?” said Max.

The utter astonishment of his voice reached her.  She turned and looked at him.  “She died in the same way,” she said.

“But—­great heavens above—­not with my connivance!” he exclaimed.

She continued to look at him, but with that same far look, as though she saw many things besides.  “Yet—­you knew!” she said.

He made a curt gesture of repudiation.  “I suspected—­perhaps.  I actually knew—­nothing.”

“I see,” she said, with a faint smile.  “She just slipped through—­and you looked the other way.”

“Nothing of the sort!” he said sternly.  “I did my utmost—­as I have always done my utmost—­to prolong life.  It is my duty—­the first principle of my profession; and I hold it—­I always have held it—­as sacred.”

“And yet—­you let Violet’s go,” she said.

He swung round almost violently and turned his back.  “I will not discuss that point any further,” he said.

She looked at him with an odd dispassionateness.  She still seemed to be searching the distant past.  “You never liked her,” she said at last slowly.  “And she was horribly afraid of you—­afraid of you!” A sudden tremor of awakening life ran through the words.  The stunned look began to pass.  Again the horror looked out of her eyes.  “She was so afraid of you that—­when she went mad—­she tried to kill you.  Ah, I see now!” She caught her breath sharply—­“You—­you were afraid too!”

He remained with his back turned upon her, motionless as a statue.

“And so—­and so—­” Her eyes came swiftly back to the present and saw him only.  The horror in them had become vivid, anguished.  She rose and stretched an accusing finger towards him.  “That was why you ended her life!” she said.  “It was—­to save—­your own!”

He wheeled round at that and faced her with that in his eyes which she had never before seen there—­a look that sent the blood to her heart.  “By Heaven, Olga,” he said, “you go—­rather far!”

He came towards her slowly.  There was something terrible about him at that moment, something that held her fettered and dumb before him, though—­so great was her horror—­she would have given all she had to turn and flee.