"The talent you mentioned," I said. "As I read your character—and I think I am right—you are an artist in crime. You are not the common cut-throat who acts out of passion or greed. No, I think you are something subtler than that. You love power, hidden power. You flatter your vanity by despising mankind and making them your tools. You scorn the smattering of inaccuracies which passes for human knowledge, and I will not venture to say you are wrong. Therefore you use your brains to frustrate it. Unhappily the life of millions is built on that smattering, so you are a foe to society. But there would be no flavour in controlling subterranean things if you were yourself a mole working in the dark. To get the full flavour, the irony of it all, you must live in the light. I can imagine you laughing in your soul as you move about our world, praising it with your lips, patting it with your hands, and kicking its props away with your feet. I can see the charm of it. But it is over now."
"Over?" he asked.
"Over," I repeated. "The end has come—the utter, final and absolute end."
He made a sudden, odd, nervous movement, pushing his glasses close back upon his eyes.
"What about yourself?" he said hoarsely. "Do you think you can play against me without suffering desperate penalties?"
He was holding a cord in his hand with a knob on the end of it. He now touched a button in the knob and there came the faint sound of a bell.
The door was behind me and he was looking beyond me towards it. I was entirely at his mercy, but I never budged an inch. I do not know how I managed to keep calm, but I did it, and without much effort. I went on speaking, conscious that the door had opened and that someone was at my back.
"It is really quite useless trying to frighten me. I am safe, because I am dealing with an intelligent man and not with the ordinary half-witted criminal. You do not want my life in silly revenge. If you call in your men and strangle me between you what earthly good would it do you?"
He was looking beyond me and the passion—a sudden white-hot passion like an epilepsy—was dying out of his face.
"A mistake, James," he said. "You can go."