-clay. She felt it sliding under her and herself sliding with it,
softly, down into darkness. She was bruised. She had wrenched her
shoulder terribly, but she clenched her teeth and kept back the cry she
had all but uttered.

The sliding ceased, and she tried to raise herself on an elbow out of the
choking smother of clay-dust. The effort sent a stab of pain through her,
exquisite, excruciating. She dropped forward upon her face, and there in
the darkness she fainted.

Hester, having closed the window, put out the lights quietly, pausing in
the outer office for a glance at the raked-out stove. Outside, as she
locked the door behind her, she paused again at the head of the step for
an upward look at the sky, where, beyond the clouds, a small star or two
twinkled in the dark square of Pegasus. She never knew how close in that
instant she stood to death. Within six paces of her crouched a man made
desperate by the worst of terrors--terror of himself; and maddened by the
worst of all provocatives--jealousy.

He had come to her on a forlorn hope, believing that she only--if any
helper in the world--could be his salvation from the devil within him.
Not in cruelty, but in fear--which can be crueller than cruelty itself--he
had packed off the helpless blind boy beyond his reach. He had promised
himself that by dismissing the temptation he could lay the devil at a
stroke and finally. On his way back from the station he had heard
whispered within him the horrible truth: that he was a lost man, without
self-control.

He had sought her merely by the instinct of self-preservation. She had
cowed and mastered him once. In awful consciousness of his infirmity he
craved only to be mastered again, to be soothed, quieted. He nodded to
the men and women he passed in the streets. They saw nothing amiss with
him--nothing more than his habitual straight-lipped visage and ill-fitting
clothes.

He had dogged her to the office and listened outside for one, two, three
hours. In the end, as he believed, he had caught her at tryst with his
worst enemy--with the man who had knocked him down and humiliated him.
Yet in his instant need he hated Tom Trevarthen less as a rival in love,
less from remembered humiliation, than as a robber of the sole plank which
might have saved him from drowning.

So long had the pair been closeted together that a saner jealousy might
have suggested more evil suspicions. His jealousy passed these b