e hearth. There is an excellent
photograph of it in the record, showing the single andiron, that
mysterious andiron upon which the whole tragedy seemed to turn as on a
hinge.

Rodman used this drawing-room for a workshop. He kept it close-shuttered
and locked. Not even this big, yellow, servile creature who took
exclusive care of him in the house was allowed to enter, except under
Rodman's eye. What he saw in the final scenes of the tragedy, he saw
looking in through a crack under the door. The earlier things he noticed
when he put logs on the fire at dark.

Time is hardly a measure for the activities of the mind. These
reflections winged by in a scarcely perceptible interval of it. They
have taken me some time to write out here, but they crowded past while
the big Oriental was speaking--in the pause between his words.

"The print," he continued, "was the first confirmation of evidence,
but it was not the first indicatory sign. I doubt if the Master himself
noticed the thing at the beginning. The seductions of this disaster
could not have come quickly; and besides that, Excellency, the agencies
behind the material world get a footing in it only with continuous
pressure. Do not receive a wrong impression, Excellency; to the eye a
thing will suddenly appear, but the invisible pressure will have been
for some time behind that materialization."

He paused.

"The Master was sunk in his labor, and while that enveloped him, the
first advances of the lure would have gone by unnoticed--and the tension
of the pressure. But the day was at hand when the Master was receptive.
He had got his work completed; the formula, penciled out, were on his
table. I knew by the relaxation. Of all periods this is the one most
dangerous to the human spirit."

He sat silent for a moment, his big fingers moving on the arms of the
chair.

"I knew," he added. Then he went on: "But it was the one thing against
which I could not protect him. The test was to be permitted."

He made a vague gesture.

"The Master was indicated--but the peril antecedent to his elevation
remained.... It was to be permitted, and at its leisure and in its
choice of time."

He turned sharply toward me, the folds of his face unsteady.

"Excellency!" he cried. "I would have saved the Master, I would have
saved him with my soul's damnation, but it was not permitted. On that
first night in the Italian's tent I said all I could."

His voice went into a higher note.