“Or am I talking sentimental cant? Don't answer, if you think that. I can't trust my own mind any more, anyway; and,” with an ugly laugh, “I'll know it all some day—the sooner the better!”
“Don't say that!” growled Plank. “You were sane a moment ago.”
Siward looked up sharply, but the other silenced him with a gesture.
“Wait! You asked me a perfectly sane question—so wholesome, so normal, that I'm trying to frame an answer worthy of it! I intimated that after the physical, the mental, the ethical phenomena, there remained always the spiritual instinct. Like a wireless current, if a man can establish communication it is well for him, whatever the method. You assented, I think.”
“Yes.”
“And you ask me if I believe it possible that she can be the medium?”
“Yes.”
Plank said deliberately: “Yes, I do think so.”
The silence was again broken by Plank: “Siward, you have asked me what I think. Now you must listen to the end. If you believed that through her—her love, marrying her—you stood the best chance in the world to win out, it would be cowardly to ask her to take the risk. As much as I care for you I had rather see you lose the fight than accept such a risk from her. Now you know what I think—but you don't know all. Siward, I say to you that if you are man enough to take her, take her! And I say that of the two risks she is running to-day, the chance she might take with you is infinitely the lesser risk. For with you, if you continue slowly losing your fight, the mental suffering only will be hers. But if she closes this bargain with Quarrier, selling to him her body, the light will go out of her soul for ever.”
He leaned heavily toward Siward, stretching out his powerful arm: