All this Frances told me, far more briefly than I have here repeated it. In her eyes and gestures and laconic sentences lay the conviction of great beating issues and of menacing drama my own description fails to recapture. It was all so incongruous and remote from the world I lived in that more than once a smile, though a smile of pity, fluttered to my lips; but a glimpse of my face in the mirror showed rather the leer of a grimace. There was no real laughter anywhere that night. The entire adventure seemed so incredible, here, in this twentieth century--but yet delusion, that feeble word, did not occur once in the comments my mind suggested though did not utter. I remembered that forbidding Shadow too; my sister’s water-colours; the vanished personality of our hostess; the inexplicable, thundering Noise, and the figure of Mrs. Marsh in her midnight ritual that was so childish yet so horrible. I shivered in spite of my own ‘emancipated’ cast of mind.
‘There _is_ no Mabel,’ were the words with which my sister sent another shower of ice down my spine. ‘He has killed her in his lake of fire and brimstone.’
I stared at her blankly, as in a nightmare where nothing true or possible ever happened.
‘He killed her in his lake of fire and brimstone,’ she repeated more faintly.
A desperate effort was in me to say the strong, sensible thing which should destroy the oppressive horror that grew so stiflingly about us both, but again the mirror drew the attempted smile into the merest grin, betraying the distortion that was everywhere in the place.
‘You mean,’ I stammered beneath my breath, ‘that her faith has gone, but that the terror has remained?’ I asked it, dully groping. I moved out of the line of the reflection in the glass.
She bowed her head as though beneath a weight; her skin was the pallor of grey ashes.
‘You mean,’ I said louder, ‘that she has lost her--mind?’
‘She is terror incarnate,’ was the whispered answer. ‘Mabel has lost her soul. Her soul is--there!’ She pointed horribly below. ‘She is seeking it...?’
The word ‘soul’ stung me into something of my normal self again.
‘But her terror, poor thing, is not--cannot be--transferable to _us_!’ I exclaimed more vehemently. ‘It certainly is not convertible into feelings, sights and--even sounds!’