tions, and redescended into the past with
anger for aigrette and hatred for spur.

It was the room that she had occupied during her girlhood to which she
then went, and in the presence of the familiar walls, something reminded
her of the days in which she had believed that the ignoble bore a stigma
on their brow, that infamy of thought or deed left a visible sign. She
recalled the old legends with which her childhood had been charmed, the
combats of heroes with monsters, the struggles of lords with lies. In
those days indeed, evil had been to her an abstraction, a figure of
speech beckoned out of the remotest past, and unencounterable as the
giant bat that darkened the nights of prehistoric time. Then had come a
nearer acquaintance with it, the shudders that chronicles brought, and
the intimations of the fabliaux; but still it had been distant, a
belonging of the past incompetent of survival. And it was not until
within recent years that she learned that it had indeed survived. Even
then the tidings that reached her had as much consistency to her mind as
the news of cholera in Singapore. She could not picture that Orient
port, and the cholera she was sure would never attack her in her
father's house.

And now suddenly she was contaminated. She felt as one may feel who had
been lured into a lazar of lepers. Turn which way she might she could
never wash herself clean. She was degraded in her own sight, and tricked
by those whom she had trusted best. And no issue, not one. The dishonor
into which she had been trapped was a thing that clamored for redress,
and to that clamoring of her heart no answer was vouchsafed. "O God,"
she moaned, "is justice dead? Where are the thunderbolts you used to
wield? Have you wearied of vengeance? have you left it, Jehovah, to us?"

Her forehead was throbbing as it had never throbbed before. Above it
each individual hair seemed to be turning red. Her sultry eyes were
dilated; she was quivering from shoulder to heel. And as in her restless
anger she paced the room, before her on the wall glowed the device her
own hands had made--_Keep Yourself Pure_. For a second she stared at it,
the color mounting and retreating from her cheeks, and suddenly she tore
it down and trampled it under foot.

"Vengeance is there," she cried; and without even the hesitation of a
hesitation she bent over a table, and finding a sheet of paper, she
scrawled across it--_In telling you of Maule's love for me I omitt