“Your Lowness—” Dolores approached him with blaze-indignant eyes—“surely you do not assume that I or General Sam——”
“I never assume. I know the worst. That’s my power. I ought to be disgusted with you, and yet——” He considered her face almost as interestedly as he had his own. The charm of his smile increased. He added: “I’ve often noticed that men never get disgusted with the lady in the case. But I’ll make a horrible example of that broken-winged old moth, lured here by your light, for benefit of other mashers. Have to protect your promiscuous stamp of vamp from the outside.”
That he was angrier than he sounded was suggested by the snap of his fingers toward the window. Into the chamber sprang a pair of the palace guards.
“Nerve shock—boomeranged.” Laconically His Highness gestured toward the soldier-soul. “Lay him out in the Revival Room. See you handle him gently until I advise you what particular form his mistreatment is to take. I must work out something especially effective.”
He followed to the casement, as the stalwarts carried out the victim of his inviolate will. There he turned, as though chancing to remember the recipient of the two nocturnal calls.
“Miss or madame, I wish you good morrow. As your—ah—friend was saying at the moment of my interruption, remember that there isn’t much time. Think things over.”
Dolores took the repeated advice. Through the long, vague hours of the Avernian dawn she did think things over; thought and thought.
His Highness said she had power. Indeed, she must have power, else she could not have flouted, even in small ways, his mastery. But hers was not the power for sin which he ascribed to her. Long ago a brilliant lawyer had toasted it as “truth.” Before that she herself had called it “sincerity.” She knew before trying that she should fail at the task of rousing the worst in women, when their best had been her Earth-life ideal.
Since nothing in all the universe was meant to be wasted—not a throb of heart or thought of mind—why had she been given power? To lose it in the chaos of disappointment into which she had sunk after realizing that John Cabot was not to come to her—that the sentences for the same crime in man and his woman were not necessarily the same? She had been anticipating Hell. Although the time before That Day might be short, she might yet earn progression; perhaps might go to John, since he had not come to her. Suppose she had the right with everyman to draw upon the exhaustless supply of strength which they claimed was God—— Suppose she could possess more and still more of this power of sincerity——
Stronger than the gleams of the up-rising electric sun grew her determination; brighter her hope; realer her faith. The Rex of Reversals did not know everything, else would he have realized ere this that he could not conquer her. And he had some sort of weakness for her. Otherwise he’d have crushed her long ago. In the present emergency she would seem to yield to him. She would match power against power, wit against wit, subtlety against subtlety. She would take the case of the women of the world, but take it, as had Rufus Holt that of Cabot versus Cabot, to lose. By stress of her own emotion she had learned that only spiritual strength was necessary to communicate with Earth. That discovery should not be wasted. Over the official wireless through the days would she command evils. In the night-time, with only her own yearning soul as sending station and the souls of Earth’s sad women as receivers, would she counter-command.