The candlelight reeled and danced in her eyes. Her dazed senses began to awake. "Nick!" she exclaimed suddenly and sharply.

"Here, darling!" came his prompt reply.

She set down the empty cup, and clasped her hands tightly together.

"Nick!" she said again, in a voice of rising distress.

His hand slid down and held hers. "What is it, kiddie?"

She turned to him impulsively. "Oh, Nick, I've made a great mistake--a great mistake! I ought not to have let her go alone. She will be frightened. I should have gone with her."

"My child," Nick said, "for G.o.d's sake--don't say any more! This isn't the time."

And even as she wondered at the unwonted vehemence of his speech, she knew that they were no longer alone.

Max came swiftly through the shadowy archway and moved straight towards her. A white sling dangled from his neck, but it was empty. She thought his hands were clenched.

Scarcely knowing what she did, she rose to meet him, forcing her rigid limbs into action. He came to her; he took her by the shoulders.

"Olga," he said, "how did this happen?"

She faced him, but even as she did so she was conscious of an awful coldness overwhelming her, as though at his touch her whole body had turned to ice. His eyes looked straight into hers, searching her with intolerable minuteness, probing her through and through. And from those eyes she shrank in nameless terror; for they were the eyes of her dream, green, ruthless, terrible. He looked to her like a man whose will might compel the dead.

For a long, long s.p.a.ce he held her so, silent but merciless. She did not attempt to resist him. She felt that he had already forced his way past her defences, that he was as it were dissecting and a.n.a.lyzing her very soul. She had not answered his question, but she knew that he would not repeat it. She knew that he did not need an answer.

And then the coldness that bound her became by slow degrees a numbness, paralyzing her faculties, extinguishing all her powers. There arose a great uproar in her brain, the swirl as of great waters engulfing her.

She raised her head with a desperate gesture. She met the searching of his eyes, and goaded as it were to self-defence, with the last of her strength, she told him the simple truth.

"I have opened the Door!" she said. "I have set her free!"

She thought his face changed at her words, but she could not see very clearly. She had begun to slip down and down, faster and ever faster into a fathomless abyss of darkness from which there was no deliverance.

And as she went she heard his voice above her, brief, distinct, merciless: "And you will pay the price." ... The darkness closed over her head....

CHAPTER XXV

THE PRICE

That darkness was to Olga but the beginning of a long, long night of suffering--such suffering as her short life had never before compa.s.sed--such suffering as she had never imagined the world could hold.

It went in a slow and dreadful circle, this suffering, like the turning of a monstrous wheel. Sometimes it was so acute that she screamed with the red-hot agony of it. At other times it would draw away from her for a s.p.a.ce, so that she was vaguely conscious that the world held other things, possibly even other forms of torture. Such intervals were generally succeeded by intense cold, racking, penetrating cold that nothing could ever alleviate, cold that was as Death itself, freezing her limbs to stiffness, congealing the blood in her veins, till even her heart grew slower and slower, and at last stood still.

Then, when it seemed the end of all things had come, some unknown power would jerk it on again like a run-down watch in which the key had suddenly been inserted, and she would feel the key grinding round and round and round in a winding-up process that was even more dreadful than the running-down. Then would come agonies of heat and thirst, a sense of being strung to breaking-point, and her heart would race and race till, appalled, she clasped it with her fevered hands and held it back, feeling herself on the verge of destruction.

And through all this dreadful nightmare she never slept. She was hedged about by a fiery ring of sleeplessness that scorched her eyeb.a.l.l.s whichever way she turned, giving her no rest. Sometimes indeed dreams came to her, but they were waking dreams of such vivid horror as almost to dwarf her reality of pain. She moved continually through a furnace that only abated when the exhausted faculties began to run down and the deathly chill took her into fresh torments.

Once, lying very near to death, she opened her sleepless eyes upon Max's face. He was stooping over her, holding her nerveless hand very tightly in his own while he pressed a needle-point into her arm. That, she knew, was the preliminary to the winding-up process. It had happened to her before--many times she fancied.

She made a feeble--a piteously feeble--effort to resist him. On the instant his eyes were upon her face. She saw the green glint of them and quivered at the sight. His face was as carved granite in the weird light that danced so fantastically to her reeling brain.

"Yes," he said grimly. "You are coming back."

Then she knew that his will, indomitable, inflexible, was holding her fast, heedless of all the longing of her heart to escape. Then she knew that he, and only he, was the unknown power that kept her back from peace, forcing her onward in that dread circle, compelling her to live in torment. And in that moment she feared him as the victim fears the torturer, not asking for mercy, partly because she lacked the strength and partly because she knew--how hopelessly!--that she would ask in vain.

He did not speak to her again. He was fully occupied, it seemed, with what he had to do. Only, when he had finished, he put his hand over her eyes, compelling them to close, and so remained for what seemed to her a long, long time. For a while she vibrated like a sensitive instrument under his touch, and then very strangely there stole upon her for the first time a sense of comfort. When he took his hand away, she was asleep....

Max turned at last from the bed, nodded briefly to the nurse, and went as silently as a shadow from the room.

Another shadow waited for him on the threshold, and in the light of the pa.s.sage outside the room they stood face to face.

"She will live," said Max curtly.

"And--" said Nick. He was blinking very rapidly as one dazzled.

"Yes; her reason is coming back. She knew me just now."

"Knew you!"

Max nodded without speaking.

Nick turned his yellow face for a moment towards the open window on the stairs. His lips twitched a little. He said no word.

Max leaned against the wall, and pa.s.sed his handkerchief over his forehead. Sharp as a ferret, Nick turned.

"Come downstairs, old chap! You've been working like a n.i.g.g.e.r for the past fortnight. You'll knock up if you are not careful."

Max went with him in silence.

At the foot of the stairs he spoke again. "I shall hand her over to Dr.

Jim now. She will do better with him than with me as she gets more sensible."

And so a new presence came into Olga's room, and the figure of her dread appeared no more before her waking eyes. Not at first did she realize the change, for it was only fitfully that her brain could register any definite impression. But one day when strong hands lifted her, something of familiarity in the touch caught her wavering intelligence. She looked up and saw a rugged face she knew.

"Dad!" she said incredulously.

"Of course!" said Dr. Jim bluntly. "Only just found that out?"

She made a feeble attempt to cling to him, smiling a welcome through tears. "Oh, Dad, where have you been?"

"I?" said Dr. Jim. "Why, here to be sure, for the past week. Now we won't have any talking. You shut your eyes like a sensible young woman and go to sleep!"

He had always exacted obedience from her. She obeyed him now. "But you won't go away again?" she pleaded.

"Certainly not," he said, and took her hand into his own.

The last thing she knew was the steady pressure of his fingers on her pulse.