carefully coiled
and plaited hair, shining in the light of the unshaded electric-bulb
above them. It took him back to other days when he had looked at it
with other eyes. And a comprehension of all he had lost crept slowly
home to him. Poignant as was the thought that she had seemed beautiful
to him and he might have once possessed her, this thought was
obliterated by the sudden memory that in her lay centered everything
that had caused his failure. She had been the weak link in his life,
the life which he had so wanted to crown with success.

"You welcher!" he suddenly gasped, as he continued to stare at her.
His very contemplation of her white face seemed to madden him. In it
he seemed to find some signal and sign of his own dissolution, of his
lost power, of his outlived authority. In her seemed to abide the
reason for all that he had endured. To have attained to a
comprehension of her own feelings was beyond him. Even the effort to
understand them would have been a contradiction of his whole career.
She only angered him. And the hot anger that crept through his body
seemed to smoke out of some inner recess of his being a hate that was
as unreasonable as it was animal-like. All the instincts of existence,
in that moment, reverted to life's one primordial problem, the problem
of the fighting man to whom every other man must be an opponent, the
problem of the feral being, as to whether it should kill or be killed.

Into that unreasoning blind rage flared all the frustration of months,
of years, all the disappointments of all his chase, all the defeat of
all his career. Even as she sat there in her pink and white frailty
she knew and nursed the secret for which he had girdled the world. He
felt that he must tear it from her, that he must crush it out of her
body as the pit is squeezed from a cherry. And the corroding part of
it was that he had been outwitted by a woman, that he was being defied
by a physical weakling, a slender-limbed thing of ribbons and laces
whose back he could bend and break across his great knee.

He lurched forward to his feet. His great crouching body seemed drawn
towards her by some slow current which he could not control.

"Where's Binhart?" he suddenly gasped, and the explosive tensity of
that wheezing cry caused her to look up, startled. He swayed toward
her as she did so, swept by some power not his own. There was
something leonine in his movement, something leonine in his