What was this goal?  As she felt herself lifted, nay, almost hurled aside, she turned to see and found it to be a door before which the devoted Bela had now thrown himself, guarding it with every inch of his powerful but rapidly sinking body, and chattering defiance with his bloodless, quivering lips—­a figure terrible in anger, sublime in purpose, and piteous in its failing energies.

“Back! all of you!” he cried, and stopped, clutching at the door-casing on either side to hold himself erect.  “You cannot come in here.  This is the judge’s—­”

Not even his iron resolve or once unequalled physique could stand the sapping of the terrible gash which disfigured his forehead.  He had been run over by an automobile in a moment of blind abstraction, and his hurt was mortal.  But though his tongue refused to finish, his eye still possessed its power to awe and restrain.  Though the crowd had followed him almost into the centre of the room, they felt themselves held back by the spirit of this man, who as long as he lived and breathed would hold himself a determined barrier between them and what he had been set to guard.

As long as he lived and breathed.  Alas! that would be but a little while now.  Already his head, held erect by the passion of his purpose, was sinking on his breast; already his glazing eye was losing its power of concentration, when with a final rally of his decaying strength, he started erect again and cried out in terrible appeal: 

“I have disobeyed the judge, and, as you see, it has killed him.  Do not make me guilty of giving away his secret.  Swear that you will leave this door unpassed; swear that no one but his son shall ever turn this lock; or I will haunt you, I, Bela, man by man, till you sink in terror to your graves.  Swear! sw—­”

The last adjuration ended in a moan.  His head fell forward again and in that intense moment of complete silence they could hear the splash of his life-blood as it dropped from his forehead on to the polished boards beneath; then he threw up his arms and fell in a heap to the floor.

They had not been driven to answer.  Wherever that great soul had gone, his ears were no longer open to mortal promise, nor would any oath from the lip of man avail to smooth his way into the shadowy unknown.

“Dead!” broke from little Miss Weeks as she flung herself down in reckless abandonment at his side.  She had never known an agitation beyond some fluttering woman’s hope she had stifled as soon as born, and now she knelt in blood.  “Dead!” she again repeated.  And there was no one this time to cry:  “You need not be frightened; in a few minutes he will be himself again.”  The master might reawaken to life, but never more the man.

A solemn hush, then a mighty sigh of accumulated emotion swept from lip to lip, and the crowd of later invaders, already abashed if not terrified by the unexpected spectacle of suspended animation which confronted them from the judge’s chair, shrank tumultuously back as little Miss Weeks advanced upon them, holding out her meagre arms in late defence of the secret to save which she had just seen a man die.