e her voice had almost a pensive quality to it.

"You might have been Fred Starratt, _once_," she said, evenly.

He rose to his feet.

"I knew you were not dead," he heard her saying. "And I don't think
she felt sure, either... Ah, how I have worried her since that day!
Every morning I used to say: 'I dreamed of your husband last night. He
was swimming out of a black pool ... a very black pool.'"

She chuckled at the memory of her sinister banter. So Helen Starratt
did not have everything her own way! There were weapons which even
weakness could flourish.

"Where has she gone?" he asked, suddenly.

"South, for a change... I've worried her sick with my black pool.
Whenever the doorbell would ring I would say as sweetly as I could,
'What if that should be your husband?' I drove her out with just
that... You've come just the right time to help. It couldn't have been
planned any better."

She might have been Storch, masquerading in skirts, as she sat there
casting significantly narrow glances at him. He wondered why he had
come. He felt like a fly struggling from the moist depths of a cream
jug only to be thrust continually back by a ruthless force. Was
everybody bent on plunging him into the ultimate despair? He moved
back with a poignant gesture of escape.

"You mustn't count on me, Mrs. Hilmer!" he cried, desperately. "I'm
nothing but a poor, spent man. I've lost the capacity for revenge."

She smiled maliciously. "You see me here--helpless. And yet, in all
these months I've prayed for only one thing--to have strength enough
one day to rise in this chair and throw myself upon them both... Oh,
but I should like to kill them!... You talk about suffering ... but do
you know what it is to feel the caress of hands that are waiting to
lay hold of everything that was once yours?... I have six months more
to live. The doctor told me yesterday... Six months more, getting
weaker every day, until at last--"

She brought her hands up in a vigorous flourish, which died pitifully.
He felt a contempt for his impotence. He dropped into a seat opposite
her.

"Tell me about it ... all ... from the beginning," he begged.

She opened the floodgates cautiously at first ... going back to the
day when it had come upon her that she was a stranger in her own
house. ... Hilmer's moral lapses had never affronted her. She knew
men--or her father, to be exact, and his father before him. They were
as God made them, no better and no w