Don't touch me," the girl cried; she was trembling. Evidently the
excitement had been too much for her. "Don't touch me," she repeated;
and drawing from him as from a distasteful thing, she added, with a look
of scorn that an insulted princess might have exhibited: "Though you
have not a lackey's livery, you have a lackey's heart."

"Eden, I beg of you--" Mr. Menemon began. But the girl had turned her
back, and divining the uselessness of any admonition, the old gentleman
addressed himself to Maule. "You will permit me to say, sir," he
continued, "that whatever your motive may have been, and whatever
evidence you may have, your announcement might have been conveyed a
trifle less unceremoniously. I bid you good afternoon."

"But----"

"I bid you good afternoon."

Maule twirled his moustache for a second, and then, with a glance at
Eden, he too left the room.

Hardly had he gone, when Eden threw herself on a lounge. In her ears was
the roar of water displaced. The flooring turned from red to black. Then
all was still; she had fainted.

XI.

As Eden, through thunderclaps, and zig-zagged flames of light, groped
back to consciousness again, it was with the intuition that some
calamity was waiting to greet her. Into the depths of her being, a voice
which refused to be hushed had been whispering, "Come." And Eden,
clinging to the fringes of night, strove to still the call. But the
phantom of things that were persisted and overcame her; it loomed
abruptly, with arms outstretched, forcing her against her will, to
reason with that in which no reason was.

For the moment she was benumbed, out-wearied with effort and enervated
by the strain and depletion of force. She wished herself unconscious
again, and looked back into the absence of sentiency from which she had
issued, as a pilgrim reentering the desert may recall the groves of
Mekka and the silence of the Khabian tomb. It had been less a swoon to
her than a foretaste of peace, the antithesis of life compressed into a
second; and she longed for a repetition of the sudden suffocation of its
embrace. But memory had got its baton back, and the incidents of the
hour trooped before her gaze. She could not be free of them; they beat
at her heart, filling her thoughts to fulfillment itself. In their
onslaught they brought her new strength, the courage that comes to the
oppressed; and rising from the lounge on which she had fallen, she left
her father and his ministra