f the contact, absorbed in his
service to her suffering. And as he handled the wound, he had praised
her courage.

"It'll hurt like hell," he had said, "before it's done with you. But
when it hurts most it's healing."

That night she did not sleep. Neither did he. As she lay in bed she
could hear his feet on the floor, pacing his narrow room at the back,
above hers.

Her wild beast woke and tore her. She was hardly aware of the sound of
his feet overhead. It was indifferent to her as traffic in the street.
The throb of it was merged in the steady throb of her passion.

The beast was falling now upon Laura's image and destroying it. It hated
Laura as it had once hated Tanqueray. It hated her white face and
virginal body and the pathos that had drawn Owen to her. For the beast,
though savage, was not blind. It discerned; it discriminated. In that
other time of its unloosing it had not fallen upon Jane; it had known
Jane for its fellow, the victim of Tanqueray's devilry. It had pursued
Tanqueray and clung to him, and it had turned on him when he beat it
back. It could have lain low for ever at Owen's feet and under the pity
of his hands. It had no quarrel with spirit. But now that it saw Laura's
little body standing between it and Owen, it broke out in the untamed,
unrelenting fury of flesh against flesh.

The sound of Owen's feet continued, tramping the floor above her. She
sat up and listened. It was not the first time that she had watched with
him; that she had kept still there to listen till all her senses
streamed into that one sense, and hearing gave the thrill of touch. She
had learned to know his mood by his footstep. She knew the swinging,
rhythmic tread that beat out the measure of his verse, the slow,
lingering tread that marked the procession of his thoughts, and the
troubled, jerking tread that shook her nerves, that sent through her,
like an agonized pulse, the vibration of his suffering.

It shook her now. She received and endured his trouble.

She had got out of bed and dressed and went up-stairs to Owen's door,
and knocked softly. She heard him stride to the door with the impetus of
fury; it opened violently, and she swept past him into the room.

His mood softened at the sight of her haggard face and feverish eyes. He
stood by the door, holding it so that it sheltered her yet did not shut
her in.

"What is it, Nina?" He was contemplating her with a certain sad
perplexity, a disturbance that was