front of
her with drawn fist and threatening mien. He started back and she,
with her arm before her face, did not see the awesome look that leaped
across his countenance. His arm dropped and for a moment his face was
the battle-ground of fierce, contending wills and furious passions.
Then his whole body writhed as if in a convulsion, his arms sprang
straight up in the air and a cry of mortal agony, of defeat, despair
and hopeless, futile wrath rang through the room.

So uncanny and so heartbroken was that cry, as might be the howl of a
lost soul raging impotently, that it seemed to stop the course of the
very blood in her veins. In fear and terror she dropped her guarding
arm, half feeling already the blow she expected to receive in her
face, and quailing from the raving madman she was sure was about to
spring upon her.

But instead of Felix Brand, frenzied and brutal, her eyes fell upon
the man whose help she had invoked. Hugh Gordon was before her, his
arms upraised as if in gratitude to heaven, his lifted face glowing
with triumph. She stared at him with wide, terrified eyes and cowered
against the wall, all her faculties numbed by the awesomeness of this
miraculous thing.

"I've won!" Gordon was crying in exultant tones. "That beast is
conquered at last, for good and all!"

He strode a few paces up the room and back, and his figure seemed to
grow before Henrietta's very eyes in his exultation over his victory.
As he turned back his gaze fell upon the terrified girl at whose need
he had sprung, with mighty effort, into final, lasting dominance.

"Don't be frightened," he said gently, leaning toward her with
outstretched, reassuring hand. "You called me, and I came--came to
help you, to save you, and to love you. You have nothing to fear now.
That incarnate baseness has sunk down, down, too deep for
resurrection! He shall never return!"

"Hugh! Hugh!" she quavered. "What have you done with him? Where is
he?"

Upon Gordon's exultant countenance there fell a shade of solemnity. "I
know not," he replied in awed tones. "What has become of him is one of
the mysteries of the human soul, a mystery whose beginning and whose
growth I understand, as you shall too, but whose end no man can
explain. The man whom you knew, whom everyone knew, who knew himself,
as Felix Brand, is no more. He will never exist again.

"Deliberately that man chose the worse side of his nature and
cherished it and tried to ignore and cast o