new the agony of the longing to feel the
ecstasy of spiritual intoxication, and yet to feel as if your brain
were a cloud-bank--of knowing that you are divinely gifted, that the
world should be ringing with your name, and yet of being as mute as if
screwed within a coffin!"

"My dear boy, it will all come out right in the end. Science and your
own will can do much, and as for the rest, perhaps Miss Penrhyn
will do for you what those letters intimate Sioned did for your
grandfather."

Dartmouth got up and leaned his elbow on the mantelpiece.

"I do not know that I shall marry Weir Penrhyn," he said.

"Why not? Because your grandfather had an intrigue with her
grandmother?--which, by the way, is by no means clearly proved. That
there was a plan on foot to that end the letters pretty well show,
but--"

"I don't care a hang about the sins of my ancestors, or of Weir's
either--if that were all. If I do not marry her it will be because I
do not care to shatter an ideal into still smaller bits. I loved her
with what little good was left in me. I placed her on a pedestal and
rejoiced that I was able so to do. Now she is the woman whose guilty
love sent us both to our death. I could never forget it. There would
always be a spot on the sun."

"My God, Harold," exclaimed Hollington, "you _are_ mad. Of all the
insane, ridiculous, idiotic speeches that ever came from man's lips,
that is the worst."

"I can't help it, Becky. The idea, the knowledge, is my very life and
soul; and when you think it all over you will see that there are many
things that cannot be explained--Weir's words in the gallery, for
instance. They coincide exactly with the vision I had four nights
later. And a dozen other things--you can think them out for yourself.
When you do, you will understand that there is but one light in which
to look at the question: Weir Penrhyn and I are Lionel Dartmouth and
Sioned Penrhyn reborn, and that is the end of the matter."

Hollington groaned, and threw himself back in his chair with an
impatient gesture.

"Well," he said, after a few moments' silence, "accepting your
remarkable premisses for the sake of argument, will you kindly
enlighten me as to since when you became so beautifully complete
and altogether puerile a moralist? Suppose you did sin with her some
three-quarters of a century ago, have not time and suffering purified
you both--or rather her? I suppose it does not make so much difference
about you."