“Still—it breaks down. It breaks down,” he cried.
“Never. You don’t understand,” she said. “It was the flaw in the crystal.”
Soon, very soon he would know it. Already he had shown submission.
She had no doubt of the working of the Power. Bella remained as a sign that it had once been, and that, given the flawless crystal, it should be again.
THE NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE
This is the story Marston told me. He didn’t want to tell it. I had to tear it from him bit by bit. I’ve pieced the bits together in their time order, and explained things here and there, but the facts are the facts he gave me. There’s nothing that I didn’t get out of him somehow.
Out of him—you’ll admit my source is unimpeachable. Edward Marston, the great K.C., and the author of an admirable work on “The Logic of Evidence.” You should have read the chapters on “What Evidence Is and What It Is Not.” You may say he lied; but if you knew Marston you’d know he wouldn’t lie, for the simple reason that he’s incapable of inventing anything. So that, if you ask me whether I believe this tale, all I can say is, I believe the things happened, because he said they happened and because they happened to him. As for what they were—well, I don’t pretend to explain it, neither would he.
You know he was married twice. He adored his first wife, Rosamund, and Rosamund adored him. I suppose they were completely happy. She was fifteen years younger than he, and beautiful. I wish I could make you see how beautiful. Her eyes and mouth had the same sort of bow, full and wide-sweeping, and they stared out of her face with the same grave, contemplative innocence. Her mouth was finished off at each corner with the loveliest little moulding, rounded like the pistil of a flower. She wore her hair in a solid gold fringe over her forehead, like a child’s, and a big coil at the back. When it was let down it hung in a heavy cable to her waist. Marston used to tease her about it. She had a trick of tossing back the rope in the night when it was hot under her, and it would fall smack across his face and hurt him.
There was a pathos about her that I can’t describe—a curious, pure, sweet beauty, like a child’s; perfect, and perfectly immature; so immature that you couldn’t conceive its lasting—like that—any more than childhood lasts. Marston used to say it made him nervous. He was afraid of waking up in the morning and finding that it had changed in the night. And her beauty was so much a part of herself that you couldn’t think of her without it. Somehow you felt that if it went she must go too.