scale
the stars and succeed where millions fail. In art they live, the makers
of new periods, the dreamers of new styles. They make themselves the
vocal sun-glasses of God. Homer and Shakespeare, Hugo and Balzac--they
concentrate the dispersed rays of a thousand lesser luminaries in one
singing flame that, like a giant torch, lights up humanity's path."

She gazed at him, open-mouthed. The light had gone from his visage. He
paused, exhausted, but even then he looked the incarnation of a force no
less terrible, no less grand. She grasped the immensity of his
conception, but her woman's soul rebelled at the horrible injustice to
those whose light is extinguished, as hers had been, to feed an alien
flame. And then, for a moment, she saw the pale face of Ernest staring
at her out of the wine.

"Cruel," she sobbed, "how cruel!"

"What matter?" he asked. "Their strength is taken from them, but the
spirit of humanity, as embodied in us, triumphantly marches on."

XXI

Reginald's revelations were followed by a long silence, interrupted only
by the officiousness of the waiter. The spell once broken, they
exchanged a number of more or less irrelevant observations. Ethel's mind
returned, again and again, to the word he had not spoken. He had said
nothing of the immediate bearing of his monstrous power upon her own
life and that of Ernest Fielding.

At last, somewhat timidly, she approached the subject.

"You said you loved me," she remarked.

"I did."

"But why, then--"

"I could not help it."

"Did you ever make the slightest attempt?"

"In the horrible night hours I struggled against it. I even implored you
to leave me."

"Ah, but I loved you!"

"You would not be warned, you would not listen. You stayed with me, and
slowly, surely, the creative urge went out of your life."

"But what on earth could you find in my poor art to attract you? What
were my pictures to you?"

"I needed them, I needed you. It was a certain something, a rich colour
effect, perhaps. And then, under your very eyes, the colour that
vanished from your canvases reappeared in my prose. My style became more
luxurious than it had been, while you tortured your soul in the vain
attempt of calling back to your brush what was irretrievably lost."

"Why did you not tell me?"

"You would have laughed in my face, and I could not have endured your
laugh. Besides, I always hoped, until it was too late, that I might yet
check the mysterio