Ransom, who had been watching Hazen, cast a sudden look back at the lawyer as he dropped these insinuating words.  Something more than a cold-blooded desire for truth had prompted this almost brutal inquisition.  He must know what it was, if anything in Harper’s well-controlled countenance would tell him.  The result transfixed him, for following the lawyer’s gaze, which was fixed not on the man he was addressing but on a small mirror hanging on the opposite wall, he saw reflected in it the face and form of Anitra standing in the open doorway behind them.

She was looking at Hazen and, as Ransom noted that look, he understood Harper’s previous caution and all that lay behind his insistent and cold-blooded questions.  For her gaze was no longer one of simple inquiry but of horrified understanding;—­the gaze of one who heard.

Meantime, Hazen was answering in painful gasps the lawyer’s pointed question, “Did you see the face of this body as well as the arm?”

“Did I see—­God help me, yes.  Just a glimpse, but I knew it.  Eyes that my mother had kissed, blind—­staring—­glassed in awe and unspeakable fright.  The mouth, whose every curve I had studied in the old days of perfect affection, drawn into a revolting grin and dripping with unwholesome weeds brought down from the shallows.  All strange, yet all familiar—­my sister—­Georgian—­dead—­stark—­but recognizable.  Don’t ask me if I saw it.  I always see it; it is before me now, the forehead—­the chin—­the eyes—­”

Ransom sprang to his feet, Harper also.

The girl in the doorway had gone white as death, and with outstretched arms and frantic, haggard eyes was striving to ward off the frightful vision conjured up by her brother’s words.  The movement made by the two men recalled her in an instant to herself, and she drew back—­the hesitating, appealing, anxious-eyed girl whom they all knew.  But it was too late.  Hazen had seen as well as the others, and leaping in frenzy from his chair stood confronting her—­a dominant and accusing figure—­between the quietly triumphant lawyer and the crushed, almost unconscious Ransom.

CHAPTER XXVII

SHE SPEAKS

Hazen’s face was frightful to see; the more so that physical weakness contended with the outsweep of passion, so great and overwhelming in its power and destructive force that to the two onlookers it seemed to spring from deeper sources than ordinary life and death, and have its birth, as well as its culmination, in the unknown and all that is most terrible in the human mind and human experience.

Anitra’s eye was spellbound by it.  As it dilated upon this vision of unspeakable wrath and almost superhuman denunciation, her own exquisite face filled with a reflected horror, almost equaling his in force and meaning, till the two awed spectators saw in this moment of startled recognition and the up-gathering of two great natures, the oncoming of some hideous climax for which the many strange and contradictory experiences of the last few days had not served to prepare them.