I shall always remember that little lake, almost as Donald remembers the cavern--not because it watches over something I love, but because it guards a thing that in life would have destroyed me! I know how you must feel, John Aldous--that deep down in your heart you must wonder at a woman who can rejoice in the death of another human creature.

Yet death, and death alone, has been the key from bondage of millions of souls that have lived before mine; and there are men--men, too--whose lives have been warped and destroyed because death did not come to save them.

One was my father.

If death had come for him, if it had taken my mother, that down there would never have happened--for me!" She spoke the terrible words so quietly, so calmly, that it was impossible for him entirely to conceal their effect upon him.

There was a bit of pathos in her smile.
"My mother drove my father mad," she went on, with a simple directness that was the most wonderful thing he had ever heard come from human lips.