should make a poor bargain for my sex to give that up for
anything you could do.'

He found his feet like a man roused out of an evil dream to some reality
darker than the dream. 'In spite of your assumption, she may not be your
tool,' he said.

'You are horribly afraid she is! But you are wrong. She's an instrument
in stronger hands than mine. Soon my little personal influence over her
will be merged in something infinitely greater. Oh, don't think it's
merely I that have got hold of Jean Dunbarton.'

'Who else?'

'The New Spirit that's abroad.'

With an exclamation he turned away. And though his look branded the idea
for a wild absurdity, sentinel-like he began to pace up and down a few
yards from Jean's door.

'How else,' said the woman, 'should that inexperienced girl have felt
the new loyalty and responded as she did?'

'"New," indeed!' he said under his breath, 'however little "loyal."'

'Loyal, above all. But no newer than electricity was when it first lit
up the world. It had been there since the world began--waiting to do
away with the dark. _So has the thing you're fighting._'

'The thing I'm fighting'--and the violence with which he spoke was only
in his face and air; he held his voice down to its lowest register--'the
thing I'm fighting is nothing more than one person's hold upon a highly
sensitive imagination. I consented to this interview with the hope'--he
made a gesture of impotence.

'It only remains for me to show her that your true motive is revenge.'

'Once say that to her, and you are lost.'

He stole an uneasy look at the woman out of a face that had grown
haggard.

'If you were fighting for that girl only against me, you'd win,' she
said. 'It isn't so--and you will fail. The influence that has hold of
her is in the very air. No soul knows where it comes from, except that
it comes from the higher sources of civilization.'

'I see the origin of it before my eyes!'

'As little as you see the beginnings of life. This is like the other
mysterious forces of Mother Earth. No warning given--no sign. A night
wind passes over the brown land, and in the morning the fields are
green.'

His look was the look of one who sees happiness slipping away. 'Or it
passes over gardens like a frost,' he said, 'and the flowers die.'

'I know that is what men fear. It even seems as if it must be through
fear that your enlightenment will come. The strangest things make you
men afraid! That's why I see