“It is beyond my power.  If I could not rescue you, whom I loved, what in heaven or on earth can save him from his fate?  Besides, he will not be utterly ruined.  It is only a part of him that I absorb.  In his soul are chords that I have not touched.  They may vibrate one day, when he has gathered new strength.  You, too, would have spared yourself much pain had you striven to attain success in different fields—­not where I had garnered the harvest of a lifetime.  It is only a portion of his talent that I take from him.  The rest I cannot harm.  Why should he bury that remainder?”

His eyes strayed through the window to the firmament, as if to say that words could no more bend his indomitable will than alter the changeless course of the stars.

Ethel had half-forgotten the wrong she herself had suffered at his hands.  He could not be measured by ordinary standards, this dazzling madman, whose diseased will-power had assumed such uncanny proportions.  But here a young life was at stake.  In her mind’s eye she saw Reginald crush between his relentless hands the delicate soul of Ernest Fielding, as a magnificent carnivorous flower might close its glorious petals upon a fly.

Love, all conquering love, welled up in her.  She would fight for Ernest as a tiger cat fights for its young.  She would place herself in the way of the awful force that had shattered her own aspirations, and save, at any cost, the brilliant boy who did not love her.

XXII

The last rays of the late afternoon sun fell slanting through Ernest’s window.  He was lying on his couch, in a leaden, death-like slumber that, for the moment at least, was not even perturbed by the presence of Reginald Clarke.

The latter was standing at the boy’s bedside, calm, unmoved as ever.  The excitement of his conversation with Ethel had left no trace on the chiselled contour of his forehead.  Smilingly fastening an orchid of an indefinable purple tint in his evening coat, radiant, buoyant with life, he looked down upon the sleeper.  Then he passed his hand over Ernest’s forehead, as if to wipe off beads of sweat.  At the touch of his hand the boy stirred uneasily.  When it was not withdrawn his countenance twitched in pain.  He moaned as men moan under the influence of some anaesthetic, without possessing the power to break through the narrow partition that separates them from death on the one side and from consciousness on the other.  At last a sigh struggled to his seemingly paralysed lips, then another.  Finally the babbling became articulate.

“For God’s sake,” he cried, in his sleep, “take that hand away!”

And all at once the benignant smile on Reginald’s features was changed to a look of savage fierceness.  He no longer resembled the man of culture, but a disappointed, snarling beast of prey.  He took his hand from Ernest’s forehead and retired cautiously through the half-open door.