Following the hungry question of her mismated eyes, the doctor gravely nodded his head.

“It was instantaneous and painless,” he said.  Then he added, “We have sent for your brother.  He was not in his office, but—­”

With the startling ferocity of an aroused tigress, Mary strove to rise and make her way to the door, but the physician restrained her.  “Not yet,” he gently commanded.  “You are hardly ready for exertion;” and even before he had finished speaking her knees gave way and she sank back.

“My brother!” she whispered, and her eyes burned feverishly.  “It will kill me to see him.  I shall try to murder him—­I—­”

She was interrupted by the noiseless opening of the door, and Hamilton Burton stood across the threshold of the enemy whose life he had that day broken.

He was no longer the Napoleonic Burton.  For the instant he was stunned and pale.  It was breaking on him that the price of conquest may be excessive.  Even before this staggering news had reached him he had seen the headlines of the extras, had read his name coupled with the open and bitter denunciation of public hate.

At his shoulder stood young Carl Bristoll, as pallid as a specter.  But the brother came swiftly over, dropped to his knees by the girl’s side.  At sight of her stricken face all the tenderness of family love leaped into a freshly blazing power in his heart until for the time it burned out the remembrance of every other thing.  He thrust out his arms and said in a shaken voice, “Little sister, little sister!”

But with a cry as though for protection from the touch of something unspeakably foul, she threw both arms across her face and turned, shuddering, from his touch.

“Doctor,” she besought in a voice of supreme loathing, “in God’s name protect me from this murderer!”

She struggled to her feet and stood with her back to the wall, her breast heaving and her pupils blazing out of the death-like pallor of a drawn face.  Her hands lay flat against the wainscoting with spread fingers that convulsively twitched as if she were seeking to press back the solid partition and escape that way.

“Listen to me, or you will break my heart,” pleaded Hamilton tensely.  “I thought it was a curable infatuation.  If I had known you cared so much—­”

“Break your heart!  I wish to God I could, but you have no heart,” she screamed, and she swayed to the side until, had the doctor not supported her shoulder, she would have fallen, but her words poured on in a fierce torrent.  “You have broken my heart, and you have killed him.  You knew how much I cared.  You are a monster, but not an idiot.  You have sacrificed a country to your one unspeakable Moloch of a god—­I hope you—­and your god—­are satisfied.”

For an instant some echo of the old dominance flickered into the man’s face.  “Edwardes fought and defied me,” he said.  “I punished—­” But his sister interrupted with a wrath which nothing could stem: