Again he dropped over.  He was weak—­there was something going from him minute by minute.

“Water,” he asked.  “Hobart, some water.”

It was too pitiful.  Harry, our Harry—­come to a strait like this!  Hobart rushed to another room with the tumbler.  I could hear him fumbling.  I stooped over Harry.  But he held up his hand.

“No, Charlotte, no.  You must not.  If—­”

He stopped.  Again the strange attention, as if he was listening to something far off in the distance; the pupils of his hollow, worn, lustreless eyes were pin-points.  He stood on his feet rigid, quivering; then he held up his hand.  “Listen!”

But there was nothing.  It was just as before; merely the murmuring of the city night, and the clock ticking.

“It’s the dog!  D’you hear her?  And the old lady.  Now listen, ’Two!  Now there are two!  Three!  Three!  Now there are three!’ There—­ now.”  He turned to me.  “Can you hear it, Charlotte?  No?  How strange.  Perhaps—­” He pointed to the corner of the room.  “That paper.  Will you—­”

I shall always go over that moment.  I have thought over it many times and have wondered at the sequence.  Had I not stepped across the library, what would have happened?

What was it.

I had stooped to pick up the piece of paper.  There came a queer, cracking, snapping sound, almost audible, I have a strange recollection of Harry standing up by the side of the desk—­a flitting vision.  An intuition of some terrible force.  It was out of nothing—­nowhere—­approaching.  I turned about.  And I saw it—­ the dot of blue.

Blue!  That is what it was at first.  Blue and burning, like the flame of a million jewels centred into a needlepoint.  On the ceiling directly above Harry’s head.  It was scintillating, coruscating, opalescent; but it was blue most of all.  It was the colour of life and of death; it was burning, throbbing, concentrated.  I tried to scream.  But I was frozen with horror.  The dot changed colour and went to a dead-blue.  It seemed to grow larger and to open.  Then it turned to white and dropped like a string of incandescence, touching Harry on the head.

What was it?  It was all so sudden.  A door flung open and a swish of rushing silk.  A woman!  A beautiful girl!  The Nervina!  It was she!

Never have I seen anyone like her.  She was so beautiful.  In her face all the compassion a woman is heir to.  For scarcely a second she stopped.

“Charlotte,” she called.  “Charlotte—­oh, why didn’t you save him!  He loves you!” Then she turned to Harry.  “It shall not be.  He shall not go alone.  I shall save him, even beyond—­”

With that she rushed upon Harry.  It was all done in an instant.  Her arms were outstretched to the dimming form of Harry and the incandescence.  The splendid impassioned girl.  Their forms intermingled.  A blur of her beautiful body and Harry’s wan, weary face.  A flash of light, a thread of incandescence, a quiver—­and they were gone.