“Gracious!” Violet exclaimed. She had been smoking and now in putting a cigarette in a cendrier she had succeeded in overturning it. Undismayed she looked at a clock. “Gracious!” she repeated. “Since that stupid duel, I have sat here an hour.”

Leisurely the lady arose. She was a glowing object in this room which, filled with costly futilities and furnished in canary and black, otherwise was Empire and brilliant. The main entrance, hung with heavy portiÈres of yellow damask had, opposite it, across the room, a tapestry panel which masked a spiral stairway that led below. To one side, at an elaborate table, which now the overturned cendrier had strewn with ashes, Leilah was seated. Behind her, through an open window, shone the eager sun. Before her, rising from a sofa was her friend.

Leilah wished that she would go, wished too that she would stay, wished rather—as at times we all wish of those who are near us—that she were different, less mondaine perhaps, more simple. To Violet, the spectacle in the garden had been tedious. To Leilah it was horrible. Moreover the atmosphere of blood and hate, the enigma of Verplank’s words, the menaces of Barouffski’s eyes, these things frightened her, inducing a dread which seemed to brood not in the mind but in the body. She could have put a hand to her girdle and have said: “It is here.” In addition she felt—as in every spiritual crisis we all do—alone. Of this she could not tell Violet. She felt that she lacked the power to express it and that Violet lacked the ability to understand. Pain has accents which only its graduates know. Violet, in all her brilliant life, had never shed a poignant tear.

“What do you propose to do now?” the lady was asking.

Cheerlessly Leilah replied: “My duty.”

Here was something which Violet did understand. Brightly she nodded.

“Yes, and I may tell you that it is your duty to preserve your looks and avoid a scandal. I did not at all like your fantasia in the garden. A gentlewoman never does anything important and that was an important thing. In no time it will be all over the place. You can believe that, can’t you?”

“I don’t know what to believe.”

Violet laughed. “I always believe what I like. That I find so satisfactory. Apropos. What was that story about which Verplank was shouting? Mercy! I could have heard him a mile away.”

In weary protest Leilah shook her head. “You know I can’t tell you.”

“The same old thing, was it? But how antiquated you are! Really it is piteous. There are no secrets any more. All that sort of thing went out with hoopskirts. Private life which used to be a sealed book has become an open newspaper. It is plain for instance, plain to everybody, plain as a pikestaff that you are still in love with Verplank. What you left him for the Lord in his infinite wisdom and mercy only knows. That is a secret certainly but only because you choose to make it one. It is no secret to me though that you are dying to go back to him. But don’t you know you can’t? Don’t you know it? Don’t you know that you can’t budge an inch until you have shipped Barouffski? Now how are you going to do that? Tell me.”

Leilah made a pass with a hand. It was as though, in some rite known but to her, she were consulting the lap of the invisible gods and, in it, the equally invisible future.

“Then I will tell you. You have got to buy him off. Listen to this. I will pack Silverstairs straight to the Embassy. There he will get all the law and most of the prophets. Meanwhile promise that you’ll keep your head.”

“I will try,” Leilah, mechanically, her thoughts afar, replied.

“There!” Violet exclaimed. “That’s right. When there is a divorce in the air it’s so much better to try than to be tried.”

At the inane jest she laughed, embraced her friend. In a moment she had gone, distributing as she went a faint, sweet smell of orris.

Leilah who had risen moved to the window and looked out at the gate through which Verplank would come. It was as she had said: She did not know what to believe and mutely for a moment she prayed for guidance.

“O, Lords of Karma, Watchers of the Seven Spheres, grant me so to live that, hereafter, I may say, I have harmed no heart, I have made no one weep. Out of your infinite bounty grant that somewhere, sometime, there may be peace to Gulian’s soul and mine.”

The prayer concluded she felt securer. Momentarily the cancer of anxiety had ceased to gnaw, the fascination of fear had departed. In the respite she turned to the clock. It was nearly five and she rang for one of her women.

“Parker,” she began, when the servant appeared.

“Yes, my lady.”

“Presently, in a few minutes, a gentleman will come by the gate. Be there and bring him here. Bring him through the dining room and up the back way. If possible, I prefer that no one should see him.”

“Yes, my lady. Thank your ladyship.”

At once, with that air which those acquire who attended to delicate matters, the woman drew aside the tapestry that masked the stair, which then discreetly, almost atiptoe, she descended.

As the tapestry fell again, instantly there returned to Leilah the sense of evil and impending ill. The brilliant room seemed full of terrors. In each bright corner a danger lurked. So strong was the impression that she felt it must be she was being warned, that she was being visited by those obscure phenomena which occultists call impacts from the astral, and that these were urging her to go, to meet Verplank without, in the garden, in the street, anywhere except in this fastidiousness.

Coerced by the impression, she entered an adjoining room, got there a fichu which she put on her head, a light wrap which she drew about her. Excited as she was, unaided as well, it took several minutes before she could find these accouterments. When, at last equipped, she re-entered the sitting room, she started.

Before her, his hat on, one side of his face medallioned with courtplaster, stood Verplank.

At sight of Leilah, he removed his hat which he tossed on the sofa and said at once and simply enough:

“That story of yours is false as Judas.”

“Gulian!” At the moment it was all she found, but then fancy a blind man dazzled.

Verplank nodded. “Yes. The letters you received at Coronado—there were three of them, were there not? three written on gray paper each signed Effingham Verplank?—well, my father wrote them, that’s true enough, but he wrote them to your aunt, your mother’s sister, Hilda Hemingway. Did you never hear that the governor had an affair with her? Did you?”

Leilah’s face spoke for her. From the bewilderment there, it was obvious that of it all she was ignorant.

With an uplift of the chin Verplank considered her.

“That’s odd, girls generally only hear what they ought not to. However, Hemingway became suspicious—for very good reasons, no doubt, or, if you prefer, for very bad ones—the result being that his wife turned the letters over for safe keeping to your mother. When she died your father found them. He did not stop there, he showed them to my mother. My mother knew the facts, but she said your father was so convinced of your mother’s infidelity that it seemed a pity to disabuse him. Those were her very words to me to-day.”

“Gulian!” Still Leilah found but that. Visibly the light was there. As yet she could not credit it.

Again, but now appreciatively, Verplank nodded. “Yes. I know. It does seem queer. But then my mother is not the ordinary woman. She thought the governor so created to conquer that it no more occurred to her to sit in judgment on his victims than it occurred to her to sit on him. In the true spirit of Christian charity she overlooked it all.”

Verplank paused, opened and closed a hand. “It was not matrimony perhaps, but it was magnificent,” he obliging resumed, forgetting wholly that it was not in him to do likewise.

“Come,” he added. From the start, Leilah’s apparel, the fichu and wrap, had made him fancy that she was as ready to go as he was to take her and it all seemed very simple. “Come. Let’s be off. I have a cab for you.”

But at the suggestion which was a command she undid the lace, loosened the cloak.

“Gulian, I cannot.”

“Cannot!” he angrily repeated. “Why can’t you? Have you not heard what I said. You are not my sister, you are my wife. Come.”

“Gulian! You do not know what you ask!”

“I know perfectly well. If you hesitate it is because you do not believe me. But would I urge you if that malignity were true? Would I?”

“Gulian, no, you would not.”

“There! You see! You have to believe me.”

“It is not that.”

“It is the divorce then! But you are no more married to that dismal cad than I am to one of your maids. Except in Nevada the decree has no effect whatever. But without bothering to have it set aside, come with me and let this saurian get another.”

“Gulian, yes, but for the moment surely you can see that this is impossible.”

“Impossible! There is nothing impossible. Why do you say so? Why do you make so many objections? You should not make any. You hear a cock-and-bull story, take it for gospel, run away, get a divorce, marry a damned scoundrel and, when you find the story is a brutal lie, stick like a leech to him.”

“Gulian, if you but knew. My position is horrible——”

She wanted to tell him that she was in a prison replete with tortures, one from which she was as eager to go as he was to take her, yet one from which she could not escape through the open door of sinning.

He gave her no time. Instantly he interrupted her.

“I know your position, it is all of your own making, too. By God, you can make up your mind to one thing. You’ll come, if I have to take you.”

As he spoke he looked so brutal that she shrank.

“Gulian, you will kill me. I thought so before. I know it now.”

“It is only what you deserve.”

“Gulian! And you said you loved me!”

“Yes, but you make me doubt it.”

The wrap which previously she had loosened she let fall on a chair beside her and put the fichu on the table.

“Gulian, you must give me time.”

The words were simple, plaintively uttered, but her action with the cloak and lace, gave them an emphasis which added to his irritation.

“Nonsense,” he retorted. “You have had time enough. Now you must act.” Roughly he considered her. “Anyone else might think you cared for that——”

“Gulian, in all the world you know I love but you.”

Verplank raised the cloak, reached for the fichu.

“Put these on, then, and come.”

But Leilah, with a gesture that was less of resistance than of appeal, motioned them from her. The gesture infuriated him. He threw the cloak about her.

“By God! You shall put them on. What’s more, you will come whether or not you want to.”

As he spoke he seized her, lifted her.

To Leilah it seemed as though she were about to be carried off violently, like a prey. Unresistingly she raised her face to his.

“Gulian, kill me. It will be better; it will end it all.”

Something, the words, the tone in which they were uttered, the helplessness of them and of her; but, more than anything else perhaps, the fact that as he held her he felt her tremble, stayed him. He put her down. His arms fell from her.

Catching again at the chair she steadied herself, and added:

“But if I am to live and love you, be patient. Gulian, if you would stop to think, to realise, you would be patient, you——”

He started from her. “You don’t mean——”

At the question and its insinuation, hotly she flushed. Verplank saw but the flush. The day previous she had told him that she had taken Barouffski to serve as a barricade between them. Since then he had cajoled his imagination with the idea that the creature stood to her as husbands do on the stage, show entities who, the rÔle performed, cease otherwise to be husbands. Now the idea seemed to him hideously naÏf. The flush refuted it. It did more. It revealed not only other relations but the result of them. Instantly he divined that it was for this that she refused to go. At once within him waked the primitive, the aboriginal self that lurks always and, save in the high crises of the emotions, sleeps always within us all. He was in that condition in which men slay with bare hands and afterward consider them marvelingly, wondering at whose command they could have worked. Perspiration came to his forehead, started about his nose and mouth. With the fichu which he held he wiped them, but on the table from which he had taken it was a layer of dust and ashes, the refuse of the cendrier which Violet had overturned. It streaked his face, griming him with a mask comic and sinister.

With that mask, he called at her.

“Then may you be forever damned.”

The malediction passed from him, reached her, shook her. She held to the chair for support. Then indignantly she protested.

“Gulian!”

He did not hear. An idea had come to him, one that had visited him in Melbourne, again in New York, to desist from further effort, to leave her where she was, behind the barriers she had raised. At the moment he believed he desired her no longer, loved her no more, had never loved her at all. Occupied with the idea he looked at this woman who had ruined her life, ruined his own.

She had been saying something, what he did not know nor, self-centered in his anger, did he care.

In his pocket was a revolver. He felt of it and infuriatedly cried:

“You ought to be shot.”

“Gulian!”

“You are on a par with the beast you took up with.”

“I took his name, Gulian, his name alone.”

It was her turn to be angry. The flush had gone, she was pale again and she had abandoned the chair’s support. She stood upright, confronting him with that purity which was hers.

“I have no more been his wife than I was yours.”

“What!”

This time he heard. But her words, conflicting with his thoughts, rolled over together. In this mental confusion he stared.

“What!”

“It is as I tell you.”

“You swear it?”

“Do I need to?”

Still he stared. Truth which acts on us and in us like a chemical precipitate was disclosing to him her whiteness and its own.

“Do I?” she repeated.

“No, by God, you don’t. I believe you. I can’t help myself. It is in your eyes.”

He paused and awkwardly added:

“Forgive me.”

Faintly and sadly she smiled.

“Will you?” he asked.

“Kiss me.”

In the unique syllables of the words, which in a woman’s mouth are so fluid, there was a forgiveness so entire and a love so great that in passionate contrition he drew her to him. Longly their lips met. She closed her eyes, opened them, disengaged herself, moved back a step and looked at him. For the first time she noticed the grime on his face. It did not astonish. It seemed natural after what they had both been through and it occurred to her that her own appearance might be equally bizarre.

Briefly then, in this lull in the storm, she told him what Violet had suggested—the buying and divorce of Barouffski.

“That will take time,” he objected. “The shortest way ’round is the quickest way out. If you had not interfered in the garden——”

A gesture completed the sentence.

“No matter,” he grimly added. “I haven’t done with him yet.”

In speaking he had crossed the room, now he recrossed it.

Imploringly Leilah approached him.

“Gulian, not that, not that! Don’t fight with him again. Don’t, I beseech you. It is not alone that anything of the kind is so horrible but he is one of the trickiest swordsmen here. Think what that means! Think what would become of me if—if——”

From the pocket of his coat Verplank had taken the revolver. He looked at it, looked at her, replaced it.

“I am a trifle interested in the matter myself. Besides, there are other weapons than the foil. If I can shoot pigeons—and I believe I can—I ought to be able to land a buzzard.”

At sight of the revolver Leilah had winced. Now she cried:

“Give it to me!”

Verplank, amused at her simplicity, smiled.

“That isn’t a dueling pistol.”

“But you never carried one before.”

“In the States I did not need to. Here, in Paris, particularly at night, the streets are seldom sure. I have this thing for protection.”

“Promise me then——”

Verplank looked her over.

“Don’t be a fool.”

But as he looked, suddenly she started and he saw that she was trembling.

“What the deuce is the matter?”

Trembling still, peeringly now she had turned to the portiÈres.

“What is it?” he repeated.

“I am so frightened.”

“Frightened? What at?”

Uncertainly, her head drawn back as a deer’s is when surprised, she glanced about her. Slowly then her eyes returned to his.

“I am so frightened!”

“Yes, but at what?”

She motioned at the room. “Before you came there seemed to be something here, something around me and just now——”

“Well?”

“I heard something.”

“Your maid probably.”

With an intake of the breath she raised a finger and for a moment both were silent.

“There is no one,” he presently told her. “And what if there were!”

At the idea, he laughed.

The laugh, succeeding the silence, while intended to reassure her, did not wholly succeed. She turned to him anew and in a low voice, said:

“You must go. To-morrow come to Violet’s.”

“I dine there to-night.”

“Yes, I know. Tell her that to-morrow, say at three, we will both be with her. Then she can tell us——”

But Verplank had drawn her to him. Again her eyes closed.

“Go,” she said at last.

On the sofa was his hat. He reached for it. While he did so, she moved to the tapestry, raised it, disclosing the stair up which he had come.

“To-morrow, then,” he said, as he entered there.

She nodded at him. “At three!”

Dropping the tapestry she turned, but very quickly, for again she heard or thought she heard a noise.

Across the room the portiÈres were parting. Through them Barouffski appeared.

“I might have known it,” she told herself, and realising that he had been listening, she realised also that the opportunity was as good as another for making an offer which she had in mind.

These ideas, instantaneous at sight of him, were for the moment stayed. On turning she had seen but the man. Now hastening toward her was a creature with an expression so venomous that instinctively, in search of help, with the idea of calling to Verplank, she turned to the tapestry again.

Quicker than she, he caught and tossed her spinning on the sofa. Then, running to the open window, he shouted from it:

“Emmanuel! The dogs!”

Leilah, falling backward on the lounge, was too stunned to hear. But she steadied herself, recovered, got to her feet and making again for the stair, called at Barouffski:

“Free me from you and you shall have half of what I have.”

“Half!” he repeated. At once he was upon her. “All,” he cried. “I want it all, all of yours and all of his.”

As he spoke he struck her, shoved her aside, raised the tapestry and vanished. For a second she heard him hastening down, while at once from without came the barking of dogs, the jar of oaths, the sound of cries.

What it meant she did not know. Her head was whirling. The fall, the blow, the indignity of both clouded and confused her. From without the uproar mounted and suddenly, the uproar prompting, into the turmoil that was her mind, a gleam of understanding shot. At the apperception of it she shrieked, ran to the window where she shrieked again. The loosened dogs had sprung at Verplank, who, overwhelmed had fallen.

Again she shrieked. Answering the shriek, mingling with it, were snarls, the gnashing of fangs, the din of great hounds ferociously struggling for blood, tearing vehemently at flesh, at a flesh, though, that rebelled.

Verplank rose up between them. With a kick he sent one of them sprawling. But, in the recoil, torn at by the other hound, he stumbled. The dog was at his throat. In protection he held his left arm against it. With his right hand he got at the revolver in his pocket, and, through the pocket, fired twice into the brute. Gnashing still, it rolled away.

But now, from the other side, the second hound was on him. He saw its eyes, felt its breath, felt its fangs. Again he fired. As he did so, his hand relaxed. He heard a woman shrieking, the sound of hurrying feet. The wall before him mounted. His senses scattered into night.

Suddenly the garden was filled with people. Through the gate, two sergents de ville had come. These, forms furtive and uncertain followed. From the house, led by Barouffski, the footmen ran. Above, from the window, still there issued a woman’s shrieks.

Barouffski stopped, and turned. He looked up at the window. He smiled. With one hand he tapped his breast, with the other he pointed at Verplank. Then, in French, reassuringly, he called:

“My dear! See! You may be tranquil. I, I am unharmed. It is the robber.”

At the ignominy of that flouting jeer, Leilah, impelled by the impulse to do something, though it were but to beat her head against a wall, rushed from the window, and, strangling with spasms, fled out of the room and down the stair, where horror so suffocatingly enveloped her that in it her brain tipped, and she fell.

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