He would go in at once and make an end of her. A surge of inherited forces, a flood of old, unhappy, far-off things were whirling him like a piece of driftwood into the maëlstrom. He was in the grip of a terrible power ... a power beyond his control. It was not merely that she had entrapped him, or that he had been incredibly blind to the drab and sordid world in which she lived; in the light of a widening knowledge, the fact which now drove him to frenzy was that a creature so common and unclean should have found it so easy to make him her victim.
He did not return to the room at once. There were other forces, it seemed, vibrating in the air around him. There came a sudden reminder from the talisman that he bore continually in the right-hand corner of his brain. He heard a voice.
"Henry Harper, is she worth it? Remember, if you destroy her, you destroy yourself utterly, body and soul."
The words sank into him. The issue was joined, and there came the shock of battle. A will half wrenched asunder seemed about to be overthrown. The desire to enter the room was overmastering; a sense of duty was reinforced by the passion of revenge. There was madness in the thought that he was the dupe of a common woman of the streets.
Shaken with a fury that was awful, he still leaned against the wall of the passage. The voice of the genie was no longer heard. The talisman shone no more. The old, unhappy, far-off things had overwhelmed them.
"Kill her, kill her," they whispered savagely. "It is the only thing to do."
He was half down already. The forces of destiny were crushing out his life.
"Kill her. Kill her." The very walls were breathing commands in his ears. "It is a duty to others to avenge yourself."
There was subtlety in the demand. But this was a strong, not a subtle nature. It did not practice self-deception lightly. Aladdin's lamp was quick to reveal the sophist; moreover, it had its own answer ready. Suddenly it flashed before the mind of Henry Harper the elemental figure of the man James Thorneycroft simply relating his story. By a curious trick of the brain, the words of the condemned man were again in his ears.
"You can take it from me that there is a God."