Again she clasped the hand which I had clasped.
“There was a deeper reason for my deeds—a better reason. My will, in these ruthless acts, proved itself equal to the power of your beauty: equal to the power in you which had called forth my love. These were sacrifices to you, Mildred: to the Goddess within you! Sacrifices to prove your lover as terrible, as ineffable, as strong as was my love, and as was the power in you that made me love you.”
Mildred arose. Her hands quavered up to her brow.
“John ... are you mad!”
I smiled, and feared to smile lest the smile be horrible to her. Her hands clasped her brow. Then suddenly she let them fall. Her face hardened an instant, a glaze of resolution around its tender bloom. She sat down.
“John, can you explain what you have said?”
She seemed wholly woman. Could it be that my words diminished her? What I had to say was unreal and strange, now she seemed wholly human.
But I told her my story. And as I spoke, slowly, with care, I bled with agony. For this was fire I was pouring all about the flower of my love. How would she emerge? Transfigured to be my mate, wedded by fire to fire? Or ash?
So I went on, and told my story....
“Whence does he come, this larval man whom my will summoned, whom my will endowed with all the cunning of my learnéd brain, to slay, perfectly, surely? Is he gone forever? In that moment at the limekiln, when my intelligence had challenged my will’s deed and we stood locked in conflict ... the larval creature of my will, and my self of the light ... did I do him away? I think he is gone forever. He could live only when my mind slept: and now it is awake. That is why he strove to murder me. To drag me by the dark roots of us both into the boil of the limekiln. And he failed. Had he not been desperate, surely he would not have tried to kill his master by whose darkness he lived. My mind won in that electric moment! My mind leaped with my body, to the other side. He will lurk no more, murder no more. For my soul knows him.... But he has seared my soul.”