As they stood thus a powerful revulsion took place in Morton's mind, and with a painful constriction in his throat he bowed to the silent girl, and with an inconsistency which he would not have published to the world, he prayed that something might happen—not to demonstrate the return of the dead but to prove her innocence.
As he waited the pencil began to tap on the table, and with its stir his nerves took fire. A leaf of paper flew by, brushing his face like the wing of a bird. A hand clutched his shoulder; then, as if to make every explanation of no avail, the room filled with fairy unseen folk. Books began to hurtle through the air and to fall upon the table. A banjo on the wall was strummed. The entire library seemed crowded with tricksy pucks, a bustling, irresponsible, elfish crew, each on some inconsequential action bent; until, as if at a signal, the megaphone tumbled to the floor with a clang, and all was still—a silence deathly deep, as if a bevy of sprites, frightened from their play, had whirled upward and away, leaving the scene of their revels empty, desolate, and forlorn.
"That is all," said Clarke.
"How can you tell?" asked Kate, her voice faint and shrill with awe.
"The fall of the horn to the floor is a sure sign of the end. You may turn up the gas, but very slowly."
Stunned by the significance, the far-reaching implications of his experiment, Morton remained standing while Weissmann turned on the light.
Pale, in deep, placid sleep, Viola sat precisely as they had left her, bound, helpless, and exonerated. She recalled to Morton's mind a picture (in his school-books) of a martyr-maiden, who was depicted chained to the altar of some hideous, heathen deity, a monster who devoured the flesh of virgins and demanded with pitiless lust the fairest of the race.
Of her innocence he was at that moment profoundly convinced.