de!" gasped Arden, wrenching himself free and crouching at her
feet and clinging to her skirts. "Save me! I only did my duty as a
gentleman."

She looked down at him in unpitying scorn, then out at the crowd. "Hear
that!" she cried, with a wild, terrible laugh. "A gentleman! Yes, that's
true--a gentleman. Saving your sister from the coarse contamination of an
honest man!" Then to the men who were dragging at him: "No, I say--_no_!
Let him alone! Don't touch the creature! He'll only foul your hands." And
she pushed them back. "Let him live. What worse fate could he have than
to be pointed at every day of a long life as the worthless drunken thing
who murdered a man, and then tried to save himself by defaming his victim
and his own sister?"

Under cover of her barrier of command, the constable led Arden into the
house, past where his sister lay in a swoon, and by the back way got him
to jail. The crowd, fascinated by her beauty, which the tempest of
passion had transfigured into terrible and compelling majesty, was
completely under her control. She stayed on, facing that throng of men,
many of whom she knew by name, until Lorry's body was taken away. She was
about to go into the house, as the crowd began quietly to disperse, when
there arose a murmur that made her turn quickly toward the doors. There
was Estelle, all disheveled and bloodstained. Her face was like death;
her movements were like one walking in a deep sleep as she descended to
the lawn and came toward them.

"Where is he? Where is he?" she wailed, pushing this way and that through
the crowd, her hands outstretched, her long fair hair streaming like a
bridal veil. Her feet slipped on the wet grass--where it was wet with his
blood. She staggered, swayed uncertainly, fell with her arms outstretched
as if the earth were he she sought. She lay there moaning--the cry of her
tortured nerves alone, for her mind was unconscious.

Adelaide and Madelene, who had just come, bent to lift her. But their
strength failed them and they sank to their knees in terror; for, from
the silent crowd there burst a shriek: "Kill him, kill him!" And all in
an instant the grounds were emptied of those thousands; and to the two
women came an ever fainter but not less awful roar as the mob swept on
uptown toward the jail.

Madelene was first to recover. "Let us carry her in," she said. And when
the limp form was once more on the big sofa and the eyelids were
trembling to unclose, sh