“But why,” retorted Ethel, “was it necessary to discard me, like a cast-off garment, like a wanton who has lost the power to please?”

Her frame shook with the remembered emotion of that moment, when years ago he had politely told her that she was nothing to him.

“The law of being,” Reginald replied, almost sadly, “the law of my being.  I should have pitied you, but the eternal reproach of your suffering only provoked my anger.  I cared less for you every day, and when I had absorbed all of you that my growth required, you were to me as one dead, as a stranger you were.  There was between us no further community of interest; henceforth, I knew, our lives must move in totally different spheres.  You remember that day when we said good-bye?”

“You mean that day when I lay before you on my knees,” she corrected him.

“That day I buried my last dream of personal happiness.  I would have gladly raised you from the floor, but love was utterly gone.  If I am tenderer to-day than I am wont to be, it is because you mean so much to me as the symbol of my renunciation.  When I realised that I could not even save the thing I loved from myself, I became hardened and cruel to others.  Not that I know no kindly feeling, but no qualms of conscience lay their prostrate forms across my path.  There is nothing in life for me but my mission.”

His face was bathed in ecstasy.  The pupils were luminous, large and threatening.  He had the look of a madman or a prophet.

After a while Ethel remarked:  “But you have grown into one of the master-figures of the age.  Why not be content with that?  Is there no limit to your ambition?”

Reginald smiled:  “Ambition!  Shakespeare stopped when he had reached his full growth, when he had exhausted the capacity of his contemporaries.  I am not yet ready to lay down my pen and rest.”

“And will you always continue in this criminal course, a murderer of other lives?”

He looked her calmly in the face.  “I do not know.”

“Are you the slave of your unknown god?”

“We are all slaves, wire-pulled marionettes:  You, Ernest, I. There is no freedom on the face of the earth nor above.  The tiger that tears a lamb is not free, I am not free, you are not free.  All that happens must happen; no word that is said is said in vain, in vain is raised no hand.”

“Then,” Ethel retorted, eagerly, “if I attempted to wrest your victim from you, I should also be the tool of your god?”

“Assuredly.  But I am his chosen.”

“Can you—­can you not set him free?”

“I need him—­a little longer.  Then he is yours.”

“But can you not, if I beg you again on my knees, at least loosen his chains before he is utterly ruined?”