“I was only seventeen, he twenty-five.  It was for him to think, not me.  And he did think but to my eternal undoing.  The Cause needed a woman’s help, a woman’s enthusiasm.  Without considering my motherless condition, my helplessness, the immaturity of my mind, he drew me day by day into the secret meshes of his great scheme, a scheme which, as I failed to understand till it had absorbed me, meant the unequivocal devotion of my whole life to the exclusion of every other hope or purpose.  Favored, he called it, favored to stand for liberty, the advancement of men, the right of every human being to an untrammeled existence.  And favored I thought myself, till one awful day when my brother, coming suddenly into my room, found me making plans for an innocent pleasure and told me such things were no longer for me, that a great and immortal duty awaited me, one that had come sooner than he expected, but which my youth, beauty, and spirit eminently fitted me to carry on to triumph.

“I was frightened.  For the first time in my memory of him he looked like his Italian father, the man we had all tried to forget.  Once while rummaging amongst my mother’s treasures I had come across a miniature of Signor Toritti.  He was a handsome man but there was something terrible in his eye; something to make the ordinary heart stand still.  Alfred’s burned with the same meaning at this moment, and as I noted his manner, which was elevated, almost godlike, I realized the difference in our heredity and how natural to him were the sacrifices for which my mind and temper were as naturally unprepared.  With difficulty I asked him to explain himself, and it was with terror that I listened when he did.  He may have been made to ask, but I was not made to hear such words.  He saw my inner rebellion and stopped in mid-harangue.  He has never forgiven me the disappointment of that moment.  I have never forgiven him for making me sign away my independence, my holdings, and my life to a Cause I did not thoroughly understand.”

“Your life?” echoed Ransom, roused to involuntary expression by this word.

“Surely not your life,” echoed the lawyer, with the slow credulity of the matter-of-fact man.

“I have said it,” she murmured, her head falling on her breast.  At which token of weakness, Hazen stirred and took the words from her mouth.

“The organization,” said he, “is a secret one and its code is self-sacrifice.  To the band of noble men and women, of whose integrity and far-reaching purpose you can judge little from the whinings of a love-sick girl, life and all personal gratifications are as dust in the balance against the preservation and advancement of universal happiness and the great Cause.  I thought my sister, young as she was, sufficiently great-minded to comprehend this and sufficiently great-hearted to do the society’s bidding with joy at the sacrifice.  But I found her lacking, and—­” He stopped and almost lost himself again, but roused and cried with sudden fire, “Tell what I did, Georgian.”