“First, because of the state of excitement you must have been in; and next, because I doubt the wine that was left in your room. The count no doubt knew enough of drugs to put a few ghostly horrors into the decanter. But poor Miss Cameron! The horrors he has put into her mind and life! It is a sad fate—all but a sentence of insanity.”
Hugh sprang to his feet.
“By heaven!” he cried, “I will strangle the knave.”
“Stop, stop!” said Falconer. “No revenge! Leave him to the sleeping divinity within him, which will awake one day, and complete the hell that he is now building for himself—for the very fire of hell is the divine in it. Your work is to set Euphra free. If you did strangle him, how do you know if that would free her from him?”
“Horrible!—Have you no news of him?”
“None whatever.”
“What, then, can I do for her?”
“You must teach her to foil him.”
“How am I to do that? Even if I knew how, I cannot see her, I cannot speak to her.”
“I have a great faith in opportunity.”