Turning to her again, he said with keen expectation, “But go on.  Go on!  There is more to tell if you will.  Be not afraid.  John and I know.  I do in any case, and shall tell you if you are right.  Speak, without fear!”

“I will try to.  But you will forgive me if I seem too egotistical.”

“Nay!  Fear not, you must be egotist, for it is of you that we think.”

“Then, as he is criminal he is selfish.  And as his intellect is small and his action is based on selfishness, he confines himself to one purpose.  That purpose is remorseless.  As he fled back over the Danube, leaving his forces to be cut to pieces, so now he is intent on being safe, careless of all.  So his own selfishness frees my soul somewhat from the terrible power which he acquired over me on that dreadful night.  I felt it!  Oh, I felt it!  Thank God, for His great mercy!  My soul is freer than it has been since that awful hour.  And all that haunts me is a fear lest in some trance or dream he may have used my knowledge for his ends.”

The Professor stood up, “He has so used your mind, and by it he has left us here in Varna, whilst the ship that carried him rushed through enveloping fog up to Galatz, where, doubtless, he had made preparation for escaping from us.  But his child mind only saw so far.  And it may be that as ever is in God’s Providence, the very thing that the evil doer most reckoned on for his selfish good, turns out to be his chiefest harm.  The hunter is taken in his own snare, as the great Psalmist says.  For now that he think he is free from every trace of us all, and that he has escaped us with so many hours to him, then his selfish child brain will whisper him to sleep.  He think, too, that as he cut himself off from knowing your mind, there can be no knowledge of him to you.  There is where he fail!  That terrible baptism of blood which he give you makes you free to go to him in spirit, as you have as yet done in your times of freedom, when the sun rise and set.  At such times you go by my volition and not by his.  And this power to good of you and others, you have won from your suffering at his hands.  This is now all more precious that he know it not, and to guard himself have even cut himself off from his knowledge of our where.  We, however, are not selfish, and we believe that God is with us through all this blackness, and these many dark hours.  We shall follow him, and we shall not flinch, even if we peril ourselves that we become like him.  Friend John, this has been a great hour, and it have done much to advance us on our way.  You must be scribe and write him all down, so that when the others return from their work you can give it to them, then they shall know as we do.”

And so I have written it whilst we wait their return, and Mrs. Harker has written with the typewriter all since she brought the Ms to us.

CHAPTER 26