the creeping in of uncontrollable thoughts--the brain
pictures--the quickening of mind and body--then the grip of the madness.
All I could do at such times was to collect a number of things
sufficiently beautiful to satisfy my lust, and lock myself in to an orgy
of destruction. Then I was normal again for another period. So I grew
up. When I was twenty, I learnt the truth."

"I told him," a woman's broken voice said. "I hadn't the heart to tell
him before. I was hoping against hope that the curse would pass away as
he grew into manhood. But when I saw that it would not ... I told him."

"Then I knew there was no escape," the dull voice went on. "The results
of my father's vices and my mother's madness were my inheritance.
God! ... what a legacy!"

The voice flamed for an instant--then subsided again into its previous
monotony.

"The intervals became longer and longer, but each time the madness
recurred it tightened its clutches. Each time it made me more and more
its own property. Whenever the warnings showed themselves I fled to the
refuge of Miss Masters's house. She bought and kept there things on
which, when the mania was at its height, it satisfied me to expend my
lust. But those inanimate things, though sufficient for that purpose,
had no power in themselves to produce an attack of the madness. The
capability to do that was reserved to a woman's beauty--the effect of
which, so far, I had had no opportunity to experience. That opportunity
came to me for the first time at Nice--twenty years ago. I had never
seen a really beautiful woman before I saw Colette d'Orsel."

Another pause followed the name. The room behind the curtains remained
in tense silence until the voice resumed.

"I can remember it now--as if it were yesterday. How she stood
there--in the soft shaded light--terribly beautiful. And I--the
Destroyer--watched her paralyzed--knowing for the first time the
pinnacle of my madness. The sight of her numbed all my sanity. I could
no more have torn myself away from that place than I could have resisted
the new flood of my disease that broke over me like a nightmare wave. I
was introduced to her. As I bent over her hand I almost laughed at the
thought of what her horror would have been if she had known the impulses
that surged through me. Her voice--the touch of her--burnt into me like
flames. I knew what the end would be, but I was powerless in the grip of
my inheritance. And she--in the pitiless irony