"Why not?"
"Isn't it obvious? She recovers—she will, most probably, recover; Jephson said so this morning—she comes back to life to find what? The shattering of her idol. That will kill her. My dear old Jaff, it's better that she should die now."
Rugged lines that I had never seen before came into his brow, and his eyes blazed.
"What do you mean—shattering of idols?"
"She is bound to learn the truth."
He darted forward in his chair and gripped my knee in his mighty grasp, so that I winced with pain.
"She's not going to learn the truth. She's not going to have any dim suspicion of the truth. By God! I'd kill anybody, even you, who told her. She's not to know. She must never know." In his sudden fit of passion he sprang to his feet and towered over me with clenched fists,—the sputtering flames casting a weird Brocken shadow on wall and ceiling of the fog-darkened room—I shrank into my chair, for he seemed not a man but one of the primal forces of nature. He shouted in the same deep, shaken voice.
"Adrian is dead. The child is dead. But the book lives. You understand." His great fist touched my face. "The book lives. You have seen it."
"Very well," said I, "I've seen it."
"You swear you've seen it?"