the wit of a hundred men.  And from the iron they take the strength, and from a hundred men’s brains they absorb their wisdom.  Divine missionaries, they appear in all departments of life.  In their hand is gathered to-day the gold of the world.  Mighty potentates of peace and war, they unlock new seas and from distant continents lift the bars.  Single-handed, they accomplish what nations dared not hope; with Titan strides they scale the stars and succeed where millions fail.  In art they live, the makers of new periods, the dreamers of new styles.  They make themselves the vocal sun-glasses of God.  Homer and Shakespeare, Hugo and Balzac—­they concentrate the dispersed rays of a thousand lesser luminaries in one singing flame that, like a giant torch, lights up humanity’s path.”

She gazed at him, open-mouthed.  The light had gone from his visage.  He paused, exhausted, but even then he looked the incarnation of a force no less terrible, no less grand.  She grasped the immensity of his conception, but her woman’s soul rebelled at the horrible injustice to those whose light is extinguished, as hers had been, to feed an alien flame.  And then, for a moment, she saw the pale face of Ernest staring at her out of the wine.

“Cruel,” she sobbed, “how cruel!”

“What matter?” he asked.  “Their strength is taken from them, but the spirit of humanity, as embodied in us, triumphantly marches on.”

XXI

Reginald’s revelations were followed by a long silence, interrupted only by the officiousness of the waiter.  The spell once broken, they exchanged a number of more or less irrelevant observations.  Ethel’s mind returned, again and again, to the word he had not spoken.  He had said nothing of the immediate bearing of his monstrous power upon her own life and that of Ernest Fielding.

At last, somewhat timidly, she approached the subject.

“You said you loved me,” she remarked.

“I did.”

“But why, then—­”

“I could not help it.”

“Did you ever make the slightest attempt?”

“In the horrible night hours I struggled against it.  I even implored you to leave me.”

“Ah, but I loved you!”

“You would not be warned, you would not listen.  You stayed with me, and slowly, surely, the creative urge went out of your life.”

“But what on earth could you find in my poor art to attract you?  What were my pictures to you?”

“I needed them, I needed you.  It was a certain something, a rich colour effect, perhaps.  And then, under your very eyes, the colour that vanished from your canvases reappeared in my prose.  My style became more luxurious than it had been, while you tortured your soul in the vain attempt of calling back to your brush what was irretrievably lost.”

“Why did you not tell me?”

“You would have laughed in my face, and I could not have endured your laugh.  Besides, I always hoped, until it was too late, that I might yet check the mysterious power within me.  Soon, however, I became aware that it was beyond my control.  The unknown god, whose instrument I am, had wisely made it stronger than me.”