The light of the old allurement was glowing in the dark eyes when she
said it, but there was no answering thrill of passion in his blood. For
one moment, indeed, the bestial demon whispered that here was vengeance
of a sort, freely proffered; but the fiercer devil thrust this one
aside, and Tom found himself looking consciously and deliberately into
the abyss of crime. Once he might have said such a thing in the mere
exuberance of anger, meaning nothing more deadly than the retaliatory
buffet of passion. But now--

It was as if the curtain of the civilizing, the humanizing, ages had
been withdrawn a hand's-breadth to give him a clear outlook on
primordial chaos. Once across the mystic threshold, untrammeled by the
hamperings of tradition, unterrified by the threat of the mythical
future, the human atom becomes its own law, the arbiter of its own
momentary destiny. What it wills to do, it may do--if iron-shod chance,
blind and stumbling blindly, does not happen to trample on and efface
it. Who first took it on him to say, _Thou shalt not kill_? What were
any or all of the prohibitions but the frantic shrillings of some of the
atoms to the others?

In the clear outlook Thomas Gordon saw himself as one whose foot was
already across the threshold. True, he had thus far broken with the
world of time-honored traditions only in part. But why should he scruple
to be wholly free? If the man whose deed of brutality or passion was
disturbing the chanceful equilibrium for two other human dust-grains
should be identified, why should he not be effaced?

The child at Nan's breast stirred in its sleep and threw up its tiny
hands in the convulsive movement which is the human embryo's first
unconscious protest against the helplessness of which it is born
inheritor. Tom stood up, beating the air softly with the hunting-crop.

"The man has spoiled your life, Nan; and, incidentally, he has muddied
the spring for me--robbed me of the love and respect of the one woman in
the world," he said, quite without heat. "If I find him, I think I shall
blot him out--like that." A bumblebee was bobbing and swaying on a head
of red clover, and the sudden swish of the hunting-crop left it a little
disorganized mass of black and yellow down and broken wing-filaments.

The glow in the dark eyes of the woman had died down again, and her
voice was hard and lifeless when she said:

"But not for me, Tom-Jeff; you ain't wantin' to kill him like my brother