n clouded her forehead, while rising tears of
anger and of love weighed down her lashes. She could bear the pitiful
sight no longer.

"Child," she cried, "do you know who your tormentor is?"

And like a flash the truth passed from her to him. A sudden intimation
told him what her words had still concealed.

"Don't! For Christ's sake, do not pronounce his name!" he sobbed. "Do
not breathe it. I could not endure it. I should go mad."

XXIV

Very quietly, with difficulty restraining her own emotion so as not to
excite him further, Ethel had related to Ernest the story of her
remarkable interview with Reginald Clarke. In the long silence that
ensued, the wings of his soul brushed against hers for the first time,
and Love by a thousand tender chains of common suffering welded their
beings into one.

Caressingly the ivory of her fingers passed through the gold of his hair
and over his brow, as if to banish the demon-eyes that stared at him
across the hideous spaces of the past. In a rush a thousand incidents
came back to him, mute witnesses of a damning truth. His play, the
dreams that tormented him, his own inability to concentrate his mind
upon his novel which hitherto he had ascribed to nervous disease--all,
piling fact on fact, became one monstrous monument of Reginald Clarke's
crime. At last Ernest understood the parting words of Abel Felton and
the look in Ethel's eye on the night when he had first linked his fate
with the other man's. Walkham's experience, too, and Reginald's remarks
on the busts of Shakespeare and Balzac unmistakably pointed toward the
new and horrible spectre that Ethel's revelation had raised in place of
his host.

And then, again, the other Reginald appeared, crowned with the lyric
wreath. From his lips golden cadences fell, sweeter than the smell of
many flowers or the sound of a silver bell. He was once more the divine
master, whose godlike features bore no trace of malice and who had
raised him to a place very near his heart.

"No," he cried, "it is impossible. It's all a dream, a horrible
nightmare."

"But he has himself confessed it," she interjected.

"Perhaps he has spoken in symbols. We all absorb to some extent other
men's ideas, without robbing them and wrecking their thought-life.
Reginald may be unscrupulous in the use of his power of impressing upon
others the stamp of his master-mind. So was Shakespeare. No, no, no!
You are mistaken; we were both deluded for the m