James Dalton and his wife Georgina have always preserved a reticence
which modesty and family grief might well account for. They published
certain notes as a tribute to the great man's memory, but have never
confirmed or contradicted either the popular estimate or the rare hints
of marvels that a very few keen thinkers have been known to whisper. It is very subtly and slowly that the facts have filtered out. Dalton
probably gave Dr. MacNeil an inkling of the truth, and that good soul
had not many secrets from his son. The Daltons have led, on the whole, a very happy life; for their cloud
of terror lies far in the background, and a strong mutual love has
kept the world fresh for them. But there are things which disturb
them oddly--little things, of which one would scarcely ever think of
complaining. They can not bear persons who are lean or deep-voiced
beyond certain limits, and Georgina turns pale at the sound of any
guttural chuckling. Senator Dalton has a mixed horror of occultism,
travel, hypodermics, and strange alphabets which most find hard to
unify, and there are still those who blame him for the vast proportion
of the doctor's library that he destroyed with such painstaking
completeness. MacNeil, though, seemed to realize. He was a simple man, and he said
a prayer as the last of Alfred Clarendon's strange books crumbled to
ashes. Nor would anyone who had peered understandingly within those