bout her and her entertainments!"

The woman was shrieking and struggling.

"Give it to me! You brute! You fiend! I always hated you! Give it to me!
I am dying! I am dying! Help! Help!" But the walls were padded, and she
knew it.

He permitted her to fling herself upon him, easily brushing aside her
jumping fingers and snapping teeth. He knew that her agony was
frightful. Her body was a net-work of hungry nerves. The diseased pulp
of her brain had ejected every thought but one. She squirmed like an old
autumn leaf about to fall. Her ugly face became tragic. The words shot
from her dry contracted throat: "Give me the morphine! Give me the
morphine!"

Suddenly realizing the immutability of the man in whose power she was,
she sprang from him and ran frantically about the room, uttering harsh
bleatlike cries. She pulled open the drawers of a chest, rummaging among
its harmless contents, gasping, quivering, bounding, as her tortured
nerves commanded. When she had littered the floor with the contents of
the chest she ran about screaming hopelessly. The doctor shuddered, but
he thought of the four innocent people in her power and in his.

She fell in a heap on the floor, biting the carpet, striking out her
arms aimlessly, tearing her night-gown into strips; then lay quivering,
a hideous, speckled, uncanny thing, who should have been embalmed and
placed beside the Venus of Milo.

She raised herself on her hands and crawled along the carpet, casually
at first, as a man stricken in the desert may, half-consciously,
continue his search for water. Then the doctor, intently watching her,
saw an expression of hope leap into her bulging eyes. She scrambled past
him towards the wash-stand. Before he could define her purpose, she had
leaped upon a goblet inadvertently left there and had broken it on the
marble. He reached her just in time to save her throat.

Then she looked up at him pitifully. "Give it to me!"

She pressed his knees to her breast. The red burned-out tear-ducts
yawned. The tortured body stiffened and relaxed.

"Poor wretch!" he thought. "But what is the physical agony of a night to
the mental anguish of a lifetime?"

"Once! once!" she gasped; "or kill me." Then, as he stood implacable,
"Kill me! Kill me!"

He picked her up, put a fresh night-gown on her, and laid her on the
bed. She remained as he placed her, too weak to move, her eyes staring
at the ceiling above the big four-posted bed.

He returned to