What he saw in the final
scenes of the tragedy, he saw looking in through a crack under
the door. The earlier things he noticed when he put logs on the
fire at dark.
Time is hardly a measure for the activities of the mind. These
reflections winged by in a scarcely perceptible interval of it.
They have taken me some time to write out here, but they crowded
past while the big Oriental was speaking - in the pause between
his words.
"The print," he continued, "was the first confirmation of
evidence, but it was not the first indicatory sign. I doubt if
the Master himself noticed the thing at the beginning. The
seductions of this disaster could not have come quickly; and
besides that, Excellency, the agencies behind the material world
get a footing in it only with continuous pressure. Do not
receive a wrong impression, Excellency; to the eye a thing will
suddenly appear, but the invisible pressure will have been for
some time behind that materialization."
He paused.
"The Master was sunk in his labor, and while that enveloped him,
the first advances of the lure would have gone by unnoticed - and
the tension of the pressure.
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