Page:The council of seven.djvu/142

 it was incredible what a plain, uncolored lie could do in so short a time. They simply wouldn't hear me. All morning journals had sung together. And a Fleet Street Lucifer, a twopence-daily antichrist, had composed the tune."

Grief, concern, pity were in the face of Helen.

"One had always hoped and felt," he went on with anger stifling his voice, "that this noise and vanity, this catchpenny patriotism, this lipservice to the majority, this bag of cheap tricks, don't really count—in the sum of things. But they do. Hellington teaches one that. The malign force that lured the Hun to his doom is now about to deal with what remains of civilization."

"But why? but why?  but why?"

"The ambition of Saul Hartz is insensate. Like all of his kind before him, he doesn't know when to stop. By that sin fell the angels. Cheap, debased, vulgarized he may be, but he is still Lucifer, Son of the Morning, in up-to-date clothes."

Helen, while she listened, was torn with pain. She loved this man. This creature of intuitions, now broken and tormented, had grown more than ever dear in the course of four terrible days. The desire to help him had never been so strong. He could read that in her compressed lips, her burning eyes. But very gentleman as he was, now the case was altered, now he could no longer count on the integrity of the central