When Ordham reached his hotel he found old Kurt awaiting him with the promised letter. He dismissed him sleepily and when in his room laid it on the table beside his bed, intending to read it in the morning when he was in a more appreciative condition. But the preparations for bed roused him somewhat, and he suddenly opened the letter with the purpose of glancing at the first page, believing this message was designed to console him for the taciturn note she had sent to the station. But when he had read three lines he read on; and when he had finished the letter he read it again; and then once more.

“After all, I find that I love you more than I love myself.

“Even could I exercise that power of will which has transformed me from one sort of woman into another during these last nine years of my life, and forced you to consent to see me no more, and even were I able to convince you for the moment that I acted in your interest alone, the time would come when you would resent the strength that enabled me to annihilate my happiness as well as your own; furthermore, the suspicion would be irresistible that art was the stronger passion after all. In time you would hate me, then grow indifferent, then forget. Now, you will love me always.

“In one’s last hour one must be entirely truthful; it is possible that, if I renounced my beloved art, my great career, the time would come when I should regret; when I might, indeed, raven for that lost world of illusions of which those that never have entered it have no conception whatever. And this might come to pass even did the world inconceivably ignore my life as Margaret Hill and I found myself a prop in your career—instead of assuring that career to you by eradicating myself. In that case could we continue to be happy? If Love is the C?sar among the passions, Art is an imperious atom of God himself. It sits on the mind’s throne, and although the golden mists of passion may, for a time, hang like a curtain before it, Art never abdicates. It bides its time, and that time inevitably comes.

“On the other hand, I find myself forced to believe that I am not the born artist, deep and inexorable as is the grasp of art on my mind and soul. The phenomenon of my temperament—its emotional part—can be explained, no doubt, by the fact that the natural passions of an uncommonly lusty and highly organized woman were turned back upon themselves by the accumulated disgust and horrors of those thirteen years, with all their vitalities unimpaired; rather were they recuperated, and rushed into the channels of art the moment the sluices were opened. I profoundly believe that no born artist would sacrifice her career—which is merely the insatiable activities of the gift resident in her brain—for any man, give him anything more than the temporary effervescence of her woman’s nature. To some accident of organism I owe the purely mechanical gift of a voice; my brain, my will, the peculiar circumstances of my life, have made me a great actress, a great artist. That I do not hate you for shattering the dearest delusion that can possess the human mind, is the final proof of my all-embracing love for you. For, alas! I am Brynhildr, not that Margarethe Styr deliberately manufactured upon the ruins of Margaret Hill.

“But if Brynhildr—who, however victimized by the fates, would at any moment have given her life for Siegfried—is in my soul, a more irresistible tyrant than the dazzlin............