"'_To all my peoples:

"'Even now the Gateway of Swords yawns wide, that he who is without
fear may pass within; to the end that the Body be purged of the Scarlet
Evil.

"'The Elect are bidden to the Ordeal with no exception._'"

The sonorous accents subsided, and a tense wait ensued, none speaking.
Rutton stood in stony apathy, his eyes lifted to a dim corner of the
ceiling, his gaze--like his thoughts--perhaps ranging far beyond the
dreary confines of the cabin in the dunes. Minute after minute passed,
he making no sign, the babu poised before him in inscrutable triumph,
watching him keenly with his black and evil eyes of a beast. Amber hung
breathless upon the issue, sensing a conflict of terrible forces in
Rutton's mind, but comprehending nothing of their natures. In the hush
within-doors he became acutely conscious of the war of elements
without: the mad elfin yammering of the gale tearing at the cabin as
though trying to seize it up bodily and whirl it off into the witches'
dance of the storm; the deep and awful booming of the breakers, whose
incessant impact upon the beach seemed to rock the very island on its
base. Somehow he divined a similitude between the struggle within and
the struggle without, seemed to see the contending elements personified
before his eyes--the spirit of evil incarnate in the Bengali, vast,
loathsome, terrible in his inflexibility of malign purpose; the force
of right symbolized in Rutton, frail of stature, fine of mould, strong
in his unbending loyalty to his conception of honour and duty. The
Virginian could have predicted the outcome confidently, believing as he
did in his friend. It came eventually on the heels of a movement of the
babu's; unable longer to hold his pose, he shifted slightly. And Rutton