he
one sin of the kind it would acknowledge?

But then over him swept the same blur of jealousy that had resulted
in Graehme Stewart's undoing. This youth wooed his daughter; he
had won her affections away. Strangely enough Galen Albret
confused the new and the old; again youth cleaved to youth, leaving
age apart. Age felt fiercely the desire to maintain its own. The
Factor crushed the silver match-box between his great palms and
looked up. His daughter lay before him, still, lifeless.
Deliberately he rested his chin on his hands and contemplated her.

The room, as always, was full of contrast; shafts of light,
dust-moted, bewildering, crossed from the embrasured windows,
throwing high-lights into prominence and shadows into impenetrable
darkness. They rendered the gray-clad figure of the girl vague and
ethereal, like a mist above a stream; they darkened the dull-hued
couch on which she rested into a liquid, impalpable black; they
hazed the draped background of the corner into a far-reaching
distance; so that finally to Galen Albret, staring with hypnotic
intensity, it came to seem that he looked upon a pure and
disembodied spirit sleeping sweetly--cradled on illimitable space.
The ordinary and familiar surroundings all disappeared. His
consciousness accepted nothing but the cameo profile of marble
white, the nimbus of golden haze about the head, the mist-like
suggestion of a body, and again the clear marble spot of the hands.
All else was a background of modulated depths.

So gradually the old man's spirit, wearied by the stress of the
last hour, turned in on itself and began to create. The cameo
profile, the mist-like body, the marble hands remained; but now
Galen Albret saw other things as well. A dim, rare perfume was
wafted from some unseen space; indistinct flashes of light spotted
the darknesses; faint swells of music lifted the silence
intermittently. These things were small and still, and under the
external consciousness--like the voices one may hear beneath the
roar of a tumbling rapid--but gradually they defined themselves.
The perfume came to Galen Albret's nostrils on the wings of
incensed smoke; the flashes of light steadied to the ovals of
candle flames; the faint swells of music blended into
grand-breathed organ chords. He felt about him the dim awe of the
church, he saw the tapers burning at head and foot, the clear, calm
face of the dead, smiling faintly that at last it should be no mor