"Are you serious?"
"As God is my witness, if Antony Ferrara had been in his rooms that night, my father would have killed him!"
"It would have been a shocking scandal."
"It would have been a martyrdom. The man who removes Antony Ferrara from the earth will be doing mankind a service worthy of the highest reward. He is unfit to live. Sometimes I cannot believe that he does live; I expect to wake up and find that he was a figure of a particularly evil dream."
"This incident—the call at his rooms—occurred just before your illness?"
"The thing which he had attempted that night was the last straw, Sime; it broke me down. From the time that he left Oxford, Antony Ferrara has pursued a deliberate course of crime, of crime so cunning, so unusual, and based upon such amazing and unholy knowledge that no breath of suspicion has touched him. Sime, you remember a girl I told you about at Oxford one evening, a girl who came to visit him?"
Sime nodded slowly.
"Well—he killed her! Oh! there is no doubt about it; I saw her body in the hospital."
"How had he killed her, then?"
"How? Only he and the God who permits him to exist can answer that, Sime. He killed her without coming anywhere near her—and he killed his adoptive father, Sir Michael Ferrara, by the same unholy means!"