"Am ill," it said, "must see you."
It was still possible, that very hour, to get an express to the Professor's mountain retreat. There was nothing to prevent immediate departure. Nothing—except Nevins. The man really must exercise more care about that mirror. He was safely out of all his experiments now, but the thing was dangerous none the less; if it had been his own property, he would have known how to deal with it. But it was the Professor's secret, the discovery of a lifetime. For elaborate precautions, or even for hiding the thing in some closet, there was no time. He could only rouse Nevins as energetically as possible to a sense of his previous defection from duty; gently and quite kindly he admonished him to take every care of the new mirror in the time coming. Nevins listened to him wide-eyed; his senses were still too much agog for him to realize whence this change of voice and manner had come to his master. It was merely another page in the chapter of bewilderment that piled upon him. He bowed his promise to be careful, he assented to a number of things he could not fathom, and when Vane was gone he cleared the momentary trouble in his mind by an ardent drink. The liquor brought him a most humorous notion, and one that he felt sure would relieve him of all further anxieties on the score of the new mirror. He approached the back of it, tore the curtain from its face, wheeled it to the centre of the room, and placed all the other cheval-glasses close by. Throughout this he had wit enough, or fear enough—for his memory brought him just enough picture of Orson's own handling of this mirror to inspire a certain awe of the front of the thing—never to pass in face of the mirror. When he had the mirrors grouped in close ranks, he spun about on his heels quickly, as if seized with the devout frenzy of a dervish. He fell, finally, in a daze of dizziness and liquor. Yet he had cunning enough left. He crept out of the room on his stomach, like a snake with fiery breath. He knew that the angle at which the mirrors were tilted would keep him, belly to the carpet, out of range. Then he reeled, shouting, into the corridors.
He had accomplished his desire. He no longer knew one mirror from the other.
Orson Vane, in the meanwhile, was being rushed to the mountains. It was with a new shock of shame that he saw the ravages illness was making on the fine face of Vanlief. This, too, was one of the items in the profit-and-loss column of his experiments. Yet this burden was, perhaps, a shared one.
"Ah," said Vanlief, with a quick breath of gladness, "thank God!" He knew, the instant Vane spoke, that it was Orson Vane himself who had come; he knew that there was no more doubt as to the success of his own recent headlong journeyings. They had prostrated him; but—they had won. Yet there was no knowing how far this illness might go; it was still imperative to come to final, frank conclusions with the partner in his secret.
The instant that Vane had been announced Jeannette Vanlief had left her father's side. She withdrew to the adjoining room, where only a curtain concealed her; the doors had all been taken down for the summer. She did not wish to meet Orson Vane. Over her real feelings for him had come a cloud of doubts and distastes. She had never admitted to herself, openly, that she loved him; she tried to persuade herself that his notorious vagaries had put him beyond her pale. She was determined, now, to be an unseen ear to what might pass between Orson and her father. It was not a nice thing to do, but, for all she knew, her father's very life was at stake. What dire influence might Vane not have over her father? She suspected there was some bond between them; in her father's weakened state it seemed her duty to watch over him with every devotion and alertness.
Yet, for a long time, the purport of the conversation quite eluded her.
"I have not gone the gamut of humanity," said Orson, "but I have almost, it seems to me, gone the gamut of my own courage."
Vanlief nodded. He, too, understood. Consequences! Consequences! How the consequences of this world do spoil the castles one builds in it! Castles in the air may be as pretty as you please, but they are sure to obstruct some other mortal's view of the sky.
"If I were younger," sighed Vanlief, "if I were only younger."