he atmosphere of crime," said he. "That quiet home on the
western fiords reeks with it."

She made a gesture of repulsion.

"It's ghastly!" she exclaimed. "And, somehow, one feels it from the
very first--before a word is spoken. Imagine Rebecca at the window,
watching through the plants to see if Rosmer uses the footbridge from
which his wife once leaped to her death." She paused a moment, her
eyes upon the open pages; then lifting her head, she asked: "What do
you think of Rebecca?"

"A tremendous character--of wonderful strength. It was just such
proud, dark, purposeful souls that Byron delighted to draw; but the
only one in literature to whom I can fully liken her is the wife of
Macbeth. There was the same ambition--the same ruthless will--the same
disregard of everything that stood in her way. And, like Cawdor's
wife, she weakened in the end."

She regarded him fixedly.

"Would you call it weakness?" she asked.

"She fell in love with Johannes, did she not? That was weakness--for
her. She herself recognized it as such."

The girl looked at him thoughtfully for a moment.

"That is true," she said.

"Some of the world's most daring and accomplished criminals have been
women," he went on. "But Nature never intended woman to be the bearer
of burdens; there is a weakness in her soul structure somewhere; she
usually sinks under the consciousness of guilt."

"More so than men, do you think?"

"As a rule--yes."

She put down the book and clasped her hands in her lap.

"There is no need to sympathize with Rebecca," she said. "She was
brave and strong, even in her love for Johannes. But he," and there
was a note in her voice that recalled the night he had listened to it
over the telephone, "he was different. There is no more dreadful thing
in the play, to me, than the character of Rosmer. To think of him
sitting quietly in that charnel house, prospering in soul, growing
sleek in thought, becoming stored with high ideas. Perfect peace came
to him in spite of the stern-faced portraits which shrieked murder
from the walls. He dreamed of freeing and ennobling mankind, and all
the time Fate was weaving a net about him that was to drag him from
the mill bridge after his dead wife."

"Kroll knew him," said the investigator. "And he said Rosmer was
easily influenced. It is usually men of that type who are drawn into
the vortex which swirls at every door."

Her face was a little pale; but she now arose with a laugh