e terror, the
horror, the disgust, the repugnance of it all fell on her like a
blanket, stifling, suffocating, terrifying. She no longer reasoned--it
was only desperation, terror, which made her spread out her arms from
lintel to lintel of her little deserted door, where the last sacred
shred of her personal privacy now was periled. The last instinctive,
virginal--yes, virginal--terror at the intrusion of man, of men, of many
men, was hers now. Home--sanctuary--refuge--all, all was gone. She
stood, disheveled, her gown now half loosed at the neck as she spread
her weak arms open across her door. Her eyes were large, round, open,
staring, her face a tragic mask as she stood trying--a woman, weak and
quite alone--to beat back the passion of these who now had come to rob
her of the last--the very last--of the things dear to her; the last of
the things sacred to her, the things any woman ought to claim inviolate
and under sanctuary, no matter who or what she is or ever may have been.

But the fever, the hysteria of these no longer left either reason or
decency to them, neither any manner of respect for the sacredness of
womanhood; a thing for the most part inherent even under the severest
strains ever brought to bear on man to make him lower than the
brute--the brute which at its basest never lacks acknowledgment of the
claims of sex.

These men had reverted, dropped, declined as only man himself, noblest
and lowest of all animals, may do. There was no mercy in them, indeed no
comprehension, else the appeal of the outraged horror on the face of
Aurora Lane must have driven them back, or have struck them down where
they stood.

"You git on out of the way now!" she heard the coarse voice of someone
say in her face....

She held her arms out across her door only for an instant longer--she
never knew by whom it was, or when, that they were swept down, and she
herself swept aside, crumpled in a corner of her room.

The mob was in her home; she had no sanctuary! She caught glimpses of
dark shoulders, compacted by the narrowness of the little rooms, surging
on in and over everything, into every room, testing every crack and
crevice. She heard laughs, oaths, obscenity such as she had never
dreamed men used--for she knew little of the man animal--heard the
rising unison of voices recording a renewed disappointment and chagrin.

"Damn her! She's got away with him!" called out someone.

"Sure she has--we might of expected it,"