wrists were red,
swollen, bruised from his fierce grasp.

"Look! See what you've done. You were a beast. You made me fight like a
beast. My hands were claws--my whole body one hard knot of muscle. You
couldn't hold me--you couldn't kiss me.... Suppose you ARE able to hold
me--later. I'll only be the husk of a woman. I'll just be a cold shell,
doubled-up, unrelaxed, a callous thing never to yield.... All that's
ME, the girl, the woman you say you love--will be inside, shrinking,
loathing, hating, sickened to death. You will only kiss--embrace--a
thing you've degraded. The warmth, the sweetness, the quiver, the
thrill, the response, the life--all that is the soul of a woman and
makes her lovable will be murdered."

Then she drew still closer to Kells, and with all the wondrous subtlety
of a woman in a supreme moment where a life and a soul hang in the
balance, she made of herself an absolute contrast to the fierce, wild,
unyielding creature who had fought him off.

"Let me show--you the difference," she whispered, leaning to him,
glowing, soft, eager, terrible, with her woman's charm. "Something tells
me--gives me strength.... What MIGHT be!... Only barely possible--if
in my awful plight--you turned out to be a man, good instead of bad!...
And--if it were possible--see the differences--in the woman.... I show
you--to save my soul!"

She gave the fascinated Kells her hands, slipped into his arms, to
press against his breast, and leaned against him an instant, all one
quivering, surrendered body; and then lifting a white face, true in
its radiance to her honest and supreme purpose to give him one fleeting
glimpse of the beauty and tenderness and soul of love, she put warm and
tremulous lips to his.

Then she fell away from him, shrinking and terrified. But he stood there
as if something beyond belief had happened to him, and the evil of his
face, the hard lines, the brute softened and vanished in a light of
transformation.

"My God!" he breathed softly. Then he awakened as if from a trance,
and, leaping down the steps, he violently swept aside the curtain and
disappeared.

Joan threw herself upon the bed and spent the last of her strength in
the relief of blinding tears. She had won. She believed she need never
fear Kells again. In that one moment of abandon she had exalted him. But
at what cost!

10

Next day, when Kells called Joan out into the other cabin, she verified
her hope and belief, not so much