t then over him swept the same blur of jealousy that had resulted in
Graehme Stewart's undoing. This youth wooed his daughter; he had won
her affections away. Strangely enough Galen Albret confused the new
and the old; again youth cleaved to youth, leaving age apart. Age felt
fiercely the desire to maintain its own. The Factor crushed the silver
match-box between his great palms and looked up. His daughter lay
before him, still, lifeless. Deliberately he rested his chin on his
hands and contemplated her.

The room, as always, was full of contrast; shafts of light,
dust-moted, bewildering, crossed from the embrasured windows, throwing
high-lights into prominence and shadows into impenetrable darkness.
They rendered the gray-clad figure of the girl vague and ethereal,
like a mist above a stream; they darkened the dull-hued couch on which
she rested into a liquid, impalpable black; they hazed the draped
background of the corner into a far-reaching distance; so that finally
to Galen Albret, staring with hypnotic intensity, it came to seem that
he looked upon a pure and disembodied spirit sleeping sweetly--cradled
on illimitable space. The ordinary and familiar surroundings all
disappeared. His consciousness accepted nothing but the cameo profile
of marble white, the nimbus of golden haze about the head, the
mist-like suggestion of a body, and again the clear marble spot of the
hands. All else was a background of modulated depths.

So gradually the old man's spirit, wearied by the stress of the last
hour, turned in on itself and began to create. The cameo profile, the
mist-like body, the marble hands remained; but now Galen Albret saw
other things as well. A dim, rare perfume was wafted from some unseen
space; indistinct flashes of light spotted the darknesses; faint
swells of music lifted the silence intermittently. These things were
small and still, and under the external consciousness--like the voices
one may hear beneath the roar of a tumbling rapid--but gradually they
defined themselves. The perfume came to Galen Albret's nostrils on the
wings of incensed smoke; the flashes of light steadied to the ovals of
candle flames; the faint swells of music blended into grand-breathed
organ chords. He felt about him the dim awe of the church, he saw the
tapers burning at head and foot, the clear, calm face of the dead,
smiling faintly that at last it should be no more disturbed. So had he
looked all one night and all one day in