"Ask Tony if it's not true. I told her what you'd seen before she told me. Miss Latimer--I appeal to you. Our lives hang on you. Tell me the truth--tell it to me now, and to Tony to-night. You did not see him. Not what we mean by seeing. Not as Tony believes you saw. You had your inner vision while you leaned there on the table, and it convinced you of the outer. I've shown you how you built it up. Every detail of our knowledge was revealed to you. It's we who created Malcolm's ghost."
But she had turned away from him, and it was as if in desperate flight, blindly, pushing aside the chair against which she stumbled, still with her hand held as though to Malcolm's wound. "Not true! Not true!" she cried, and she flung aside the hand he held out to arrest her. "He is here! He has saved her! I saw him! Beside the fountain!"
She was gone and he need not pursue her. Her desperation had given him all that he had hoped for, and there was no recantation, no avowal to be wrested from that panic. He had followed her to the door and he watched her mount the stairs, running as she went and without one backward glance. And when, at the end of the corridor above, he heard her door shut, he still stood in the open doorway, his head bent, his hands in his pockets, and took, it seemed in long draughts of recovery, full possession of his almost miraculous escape.
He saw the suffocating, vaultlike darkness where he had groped. Since Tony had gone from him that afternoon, the clotting horror had not left his heart. It had been a vault; tenebrous; a place of death. Yet flesh and blood had not come to his help. He had forced no doors and beaten down no walls. Such doors and walls did not yield to force. It had been his sensitiveness to reality that had led him forth. As, sitting at the table the other night, he had seen the shadow, felt the scent of danger, so now his sensitiveness had shown him in the darkness something less dark. He had groped, he had crept, he had felt his way, from his intuition that Miss Latimer feared him to that memory of her form fallen forward on the little table, and the darkness that was only less dark had softly expanded to a pallor, until, suddenly, from her bewildered eyes and passionate negations, conviction of the truth had flashed upon him. It had been like turning the corner of a buttress to find the aperture that led out to pure, clear, starlit air. Of course, of course--how clearly now the light was spread! She had had her vision of Malcolm, not at the third window, but while she sat there at the table, her head bent down on her arms. She had lied only in saying that it had been objective. He and Tony had built it up for her.