owning no individual
existence but devoting brain, heart, all we had and all we were, to the
advancement and perpetuation of an idea. I have called this idea the
Cause. Let that name suffice. I can give you no other."

Pausing, she waited for some look of comprehension from the man she
sought to enlighten. But he was yet too dazed to respond to her mute
appeal, and she was forced to continue without it. Indicating Hazen with
a gesture, she said, with her eyes still fixed on those of her husband:

"You see him now as he came from under the harrow; but in those days--I
must speak of you as you were, Alfred--he was a man to draw all eyes and
win all hearts. Men loved him, women adored him. Little as he cared for
our sex, he had but to speak, for the coldest breast to heave, the most
indifferent eye to beam. I felt his power as strong as the rest, only
differently. No woman was more his slave than I, but it was a sister's
devotion I felt, a devotion capable of being supplanted by another. But I
did not know this. I thought him my whole world and let him engross me in
his plans and share his passions for subjects I did not even seek to
understand.

"I was only seventeen, he twenty-five. It was for him to think, not me.
And he did think but to my eternal undoing. The Cause needed a woman's
help, a woman's enthusiasm. Without considering my motherless condition,
my helplessness, the immaturity of my mind, he drew me day by day into
the secret meshes of his great scheme, a scheme which, as I failed to
understand till it had absorbed me, meant the unequivocal devotion of my
whole life to the exclusion of every other hope or purpose. Favored, he
called it, favored to stand for liberty, the advancement of men, the
right of every human being to an untrammeled existence. And favored I
thought myself, till one awful day when my brother, coming suddenly into
my room, found me making plans for an innocent pleasure and told me such
things were no longer for me, that a great and immortal duty awaited me,
one that had come sooner than he expected, but which my youth, beauty,
and spirit eminently fitted me to carry on to triumph.

"I was frightened. For the first time in my memory of him he looked like
his Italian father, the man we had all tried to forget. Once while
rummaging amongst my mother's treasures I had come across a miniature of
Signor Toritti. He was a handsome man but there was something terrible in
his eye; something to ma