Her breast leaped up and down in her panting as she pressed her hand upon
it; her breath came in sharp puffs through her nostrils.

"And once," she breathed--"and once--I _loved_ thee--cur!"

He was mad with exultant villainy and passion, and he broke into a laugh.

"Loved me!" he said. "Thou! As thou lovedst me--and as thou lovest
him--so will Moll Easy love any man--for a crown."

Her whip lay upon the table, she caught and whirled it in the air. She
was blind with the surging of her blood, and saw not how she caught or
held it, or what she did--only that she struck!

And 'twas his temple that the loaded weapon met, and 'twas wielded by a
wrist whose sinews were of steel, and even as it struck he gasped,
casting up his hands, and thereupon fell, and lay stretched at her feet!

But the awful tempest which swept over her had her so under its dominion
that she was like a branch whirled on the wings of the storm. She scarce
noted that he fell, or noting it, gave it not one thought as she dashed
from one end of the apartment to the other with the fierce striding of a
mad woman.

"Devil!" she cried, "and cur! and for thee I blasted all the years to
come! To a beast so base I gave all that an empress' self could give--all
life--all love--for ever. And he comes back--shameless--to barter like a
cheating huckster, because his trade goes ill, and I--I could stock his
counters once again."

She strode towards him, raving.

"Think you I do not know, woman's bully and poltroon, that you plot to
sell yourself, because your day has come, and no woman will bid for such
an outcast, saving one that you may threaten. Rise, vermin--rise, lest I
kill thee!"

In her blind madness she lashed him once across the face again. And he
stirred not--and something in the resistless feeling of the flesh beneath
the whip, and in the quiet of his lying, caused her to pause and stand
panting and staring at the thing which lay before her. For it was a
Thing, and as she stood staring, with wild heaving breast, this she saw.
'Twas but a thing--a thing lying inert, its fair locks outspread, its
eyes rolled upward till the blue was almost lost; a purple indentation on
the right temple from which there oozed a tiny thread of blood.

* * * * *

"There will be a way," she had said, and yet in her most mad despair, of
this way she had never thought; though strange it had been, considering
her lawless past, that she had not--never of th