cowardice, rushed back upon him. Then, abruptly, there came upon
him this thought--"Vere believes I have power over Hermione." And then
followed the thought--"Gaspare believes that I have power over her." And
the ice seemed to crack. He saw fissures in it. He saw it melting.
He saw the "thing" it had covered appearing, being gradually revealed
as--man.

"Vere believes in my power. Gaspare believes in my power. They are the
nearest to Hermione. They know her best. Their instincts about her
must be the strongest, the truest. Why do they believe in it? Why do
they--why do they know--for they must, they do know, that I have this
power, that I am the one to succeed where any one else would fail? Why
have they left Hermione in my hands to-night?"

The ice was gone. The lightning flash lit up a man warm with the breath
of life. From the gaunt door of the abandoned palace the strip of black
cloth, the tragic words above it, dropped down and disappeared.

Suddenly Artois knew why Vere believed in his power, and why Gaspare
believed in it--knew how their instincts had guided them, knew to what
secret knowledge--perhaps not even consciously now their knowledge--they
had travelled. And he remembered the words he had written in the book at
Frisio's on the night of the storm:

"La Conscience, c'est la quantite de science innee que nous avons en
nous."

He had written those words hurriedly, irritably, merely because he had
to write something, and they chanced--he knew not why--to come into his
mind as he took hold of the pen. And it was on that night, surely, that
his conscience--his innate knowledge--began to betray him. Or--no--it
was on that night that he began to defy it, to deny it, to endeavor to
cast it out.

For surely he must have known, he had known, what Vere and Gaspare
innately knew. Surely his conscience had not slept while theirs had been
awake.

He did not know. It seemed to him as if he had not time to decide this
now. Very rapidly his mind had worked, rushing surely through corridors
of knowledge to gain an inner room. He had only stood at the foot of
the crumbling staircase two or three minutes before he moved again
decisively, called again, decisively:

"Hermione! Hermione! I know you are here. I have come for you!"

He went to the right. On the left was the chamber which had been taken
possession of by the sea. She could not have gone that way, unless--he
thought of the _fattura della morte_, and for a