r and the crushed, almost
unconscious Ransom.

CHAPTER XXVII

SHE SPEAKS

Hazen's face was frightful to see; the more so that physical weakness
contended with the outsweep of passion, so great and overwhelming in its
power and destructive force that to the two onlookers it seemed to spring
from deeper sources than ordinary life and death, and have its birth, as
well as its culmination, in the unknown and all that is most terrible
in the human mind and human experience.

Anitra's eye was spellbound by it. As it dilated upon this vision of
unspeakable wrath and almost superhuman denunciation, her own exquisite
face filled with a reflected horror, almost equaling his in force and
meaning, till the two awed spectators saw in this moment of startled
recognition and the up-gathering of two great natures, the oncoming of
some hideous climax for which the many strange and contradictory
experiences of the last few days had not served to prepare them.

"You _hear_!"

In these words Hazen loosed out his soul.

The keen cry of the wind running through the house was his only answer.

"You _hear_!" he repeated, advancing and laying a determined hand upon
her arm. "You have made a mock of us with your pretended deafness. What
does it mean--Stop! no more play-acting," he fiercely admonished her, as
her eyes assumed a look of startled inquiry and wandered away in vague
curiosity to the papers scattered over the floor--"we have had enough
of that; you cannot deceive us--you cannot deceive _me_ twice. You played
at deafness--why? Because Anitra must have some disability to distinguish
her from Georgian? Because you are not Anitra? Because you are Georgian
after all?"

Georgian!

The word fell like a plummet into the hollow of that great expectancy.
Ransom shivered and even Harper's hard cheek changed color. Hazen only
stood unmoved, his look, his grasp, the spirit behind that look and
grasp, implacable and determined. Their influence was terrible; slowly
she succumbed to it against her will and purpose, the will and purpose of
a very strong woman. Her eyes rose in a painful and lingering struggle to
his face. Then, with a cry her drawn and parched lips could not suppress,
she flashed them in agony on Ransom, and this long-suffering man read in
them the maddening truth. They were his wife's eyes; the woman before him
was indeed Georgian.

"Speak!" rang out the voice of Hazen, as Harper, realizing from Ransom's
face w