er all. He is primitive at bottom, and so am I. He gets
carried away by his emotions, and so do I."

She took up the whip, examined it, felt its weight, and drew it with a
swift jerk through the air.

"I did not even shrink when Krool came stumbling down the stairs, with
this cutting his flesh," she said to herself. "Somehow it all seemed
natural and right. What has come to me? Are all my finer senses dead?
Am I just one of the crude human things who lived a million years ago,
and who lives again as crude as those; with only the outer things
changed? Then I wore the skins of wild animals, and now I do the same,
just the same; with what we call more taste perhaps, because we have
ceased to see the beauty in the natural thing."

She touched the little band of grey fur at the sleeve of her clinging
velvet gown. "Just a little distance away--that is all."

Suddenly a light flashed up in her eyes, and her face flushed as though
some one had angered her. She seized the whip again. "Yes, I could have
seen him whipped to death before my eyes--the coward, the abject
coward. He did not speak for me; he did not defend me; he did not deny.
He let Ian think--death was too kind to him. How dared he hurt me so!
... Death is so easy a way out, but he would not have taken it. No, no,
no, it was not suicide; some one killed him. He could never have taken
his own life--never. He had not the courage.... No; he died of poison
or was strangled. Who did it? Who did it? Was it Rudyard? Was it...?
Oh, it wears me out--thinking, thinking, thinking!"

She sat down and buried her face in her hands. "I am doomed--doomed,"
she moaned. "I was doomed from the start. It must always have been so,
whatever I did. I would do it again, whatever I did; I know I would do
it again, being what I was. It was in my veins, in my blood from the
start, from the very first days of my life."

All at once there flashed through her mind again, as on that night so
many centuries ago, when she had slept the last sleep of her life as it
was, Swinburne's lines on Baudelaire:

"There is no help for these things, none to mend and none to mar; Not
all our songs, oh, friend, can make death clear Or make life
durable...."

"'There is no help for these things,'" she repeated with a sigh which
seemed to tear her heart in twain. "All gone--all. What is there left
to do? If death could make it better for any one, how easy! But
everything would be known--somehow the world w