ut how incomparably
the greater she! How severe and direct, how scornful of needless
elaboration! She belonged, mind and body, to the finest period of
Greek art, and echoed their stern, soulless simplicity and
perfection. Had she won her way with me, we should be living now to
enjoy the fruits of our accomplishment.

But though she did not win her way, yet, in defeat, her final,
glorious deed was to intercept the death intended for me, that I
might still live. Loyal to the last, she sacrificed herself,
forgetting, in that supreme moment, how life for me without her
could possess no shadow of compensation. When Jenny shook off the
dust of the world, I was ready and willing to do the same. As for
that future life, in which I most potently believe, since she and I
have merited a like treatment, we shall share eternity together and
so be in heaven, whatever the Great Contriver may desire to the
contrary. Yet who shall presume to dogmatize? "There is nothing
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." And what the Almighty
Mind may be pleased to think of any human performance is for the
present hidden with Him alone. He did not make the tiger to eat
grass or the eagle to feed on honey.

My wife's deeper sanity and clearer vision always inclined her to
distrust our American acquaintance, Peter Ganns. From the first
moment that Jenny's eyes fell upon that fine figure of a man, she
judged him to be built on a very different mental pattern from
Brendon. He was no New World edition of our poor, tame Marco; and
the preliminary fact that he should have anticipated us and arrived
beside Como before he was expected to do so, convinced Jenny that he
must prove a factor of extreme gravity in all future calculations.
I, too, perceived his force of character, and rejoiced to do so, for
here appeared an enemy worthy of my invention and resource.

It seemed clear that Pietro was a skeptical person--doubtless made
so by his dreadful trade. "Thomas" rather than "Peter" should have
been his name. He had a disconcerting habit of taking nothing for
granted; and his "third eye" as he called it--an eye of the
mind--saw a great many things concealed from ordinary observers. He
would have made a classical criminal.

The artist's pride, that had prevented me from acting so that Ganns
should have been invited to discover the murderer of Albert rather
than set the task of preserving his friend's life--this false,
foolish sense of superiority