g her, as though at his touch her whole body had
turned to ice. His eyes looked straight into hers, searching her with
intolerable minuteness, probing her through and through. And from those
eyes she shrank in nameless terror; for they were the eyes of her dream,
green, ruthless, terrible. He looked to her like a man whose will might
compel the dead.

For a long, long space he held her so, silent but merciless. She did not
attempt to resist him. She felt that he had already forced his way past
her defences, that he was as it were dissecting and analyzing her very
soul. She had not answered his question, but she knew that he would not
repeat it. She knew that he did not need an answer.

And then the coldness that bound her became by slow degrees a numbness,
paralyzing her faculties, extinguishing all her powers. There arose a
great uproar in her brain, the swirl as of great waters engulfing her.
She raised her head with a desperate gesture. She met the searching of
his eyes, and goaded as it were to self-defence, with the last of her
strength, she told him the simple truth.

"I have opened the Door!" she said. "I have set her free!"

She thought his face changed at her words, but she could not see very
clearly. She had begun to slip down and down, faster and ever faster
into a fathomless abyss of darkness from which there was no deliverance.
And as she went she heard his voice above her, brief, distinct,
merciless: "And you will pay the price." ... The darkness closed over
her head....

CHAPTER XXV

THE PRICE

That darkness was to Olga but the beginning of a long, long night of
suffering--such suffering as her short life had never before
compassed--such suffering as she had never imagined the world could
hold.

It went in a slow and dreadful circle, this suffering, like the turning
of a monstrous wheel. Sometimes it was so acute that she screamed with
the red-hot agony of it. At other times it would draw away from her for
a space, so that she was vaguely conscious that the world held other
things, possibly even other forms of torture. Such intervals were
generally succeeded by intense cold, racking, penetrating cold that
nothing could ever alleviate, cold that was as Death itself, freezing
her limbs to stiffness, congealing the blood in her veins, till even her
heart grew slower and slower, and at last stood still.

Then, when it seemed the end of all things had come, some unknown power
would jerk it