e, and blood ran from under it. But there was no weakening
of her force, no slackening in her superb body. She seemed curiously
impersonal; robbed of all traits of women; she was like a symbolical
fate, the figure from a shield, from an emblem, dragging him to
death.

Then, suddenly, in an inadequate muffled voice burdened with a
shuddering echo of fear, he cried for her to release him. It was so
unexpected, he became so inexplicably limp, that La Clavel backed away
instinctively. Charles started forward, the chair lifted high; but he
was stopped by the expression, the color, of Ceazy Santacilla's face.
The officer turned, with his hands at his throat, toward the window.
He took an uncertain step, and then stood wavering, strangely
helpless, pathetically stricken.

"The air," he whispered; "hot as wine." He pitched abruptly face
forward upon the floor.

La Clavel tried to speak against the labored heaving of her breast,
but what she attempted to say was unintelligible. Charles, slipping
back the broken bolt with a finger in its orifice, listened intently
at the door. The Hotel St. Louis was wrapped undisturbed in its
siesta; no alarm had been created. Santacilla lay as he had fallen, an
arm loosely outspread, a leg doubled unnaturally under its fellow. He
bore the laxness, the emptiness, of death. He had spoken truly that it
wasn't in his star to be killed by a man. Finding that he was still
holding the chair, Charles put it softly down. "Well," he said, "the
revolution is through with him."

He glanced suddenly at La Clavel. She was drooping, disheveled and
hideous; her hair lay on her bare shoulders in coarse strands; her
face was swollen with bruises. Now, he realized, she would never see
the Argentine; she would never again hear the shouted oles that
greeted, rewarded, the brilliancy of her jota. His thoughts shifted to
Cuba and himself--if it were a crime of passion that had been
committed in her room, the cause, there, would be freed from
suspicion. He had, as customary, come directly, unostentatiously, to
her room, and he was certain that he had not been observed. A duty,
hard in the extreme, was before him.

"Why did you bring about Santacilla's death?" he demanded. She gazed
at him dully, uncomprehendingly. "It was because he was jealous," he
proceeded; "you must hold to that." She nodded, dazed. "When they come
into the room and find him you must show what he did to you. And,
after all, you didn't kill