“I won’t go with you,” she cried.  “You may beat me; you may kill me if you like, unthinkable brute that you are.  I will not follow you now; I will never follow one step ever.  I have listened to you; now listen to me!  I would rather die than be brought to safety by you.  If I cannot find the way home without your help, I do not want ever to get home.  I am not afraid of you or your rope.  I had rather feel a clean rope across my shoulders until they were bloody than your vile hand on mine.”

“You will do what I tell you to do,” he said thickly.  “It is the only way.  I will make you.”

Blazing eyes burning in a death-white face gave him his only answer.  His own face now was no less white; iron-bodied as he was, he was trembling.  Yet he lifted the rope.  To strike the second blow.  Not just to frighten her, but to strike.  She read his purpose clearly, and she could not restrain a shudder of her flesh.  But she did not draw back from him, and she did not cry out.  She meant what she had said, or what some re-born Gloria had said for her; he might kill her, but she would not follow him.

And then Mark King, as he was about to strike, stayed his hand at the last moment and hurled the rope far from him, and whirled about and left her.

Chapter XXVI

Someway he came to the base of the cliffs.  He was outside; he was in the open.  And yet he struggled blindly through a pit of gloom.  He was conscious of but one fact in all the world; about it everything else turned and spun as sweep the bodies of the sky about the sun.  He had lifted his hand against a woman.  He, Mark King, had struck a woman.  He had struck Gloria.  His friend’s daughter—­Ben’s daughter.  He had struck her....  What had come over him?  Had he gone mad?  Stark, staring, raving mad?  He knew all along that his nerves were on edge, raw and quivering.  But no jangling nerves explained a thing like that.  He, who had held himself a man, had struck a woman—­a girl!  A little, defenceless girl.

“My God!” he groaned.

He stumbled on.  He did not know where he was going or why.  He ran his hand across his eyes again and again.  He didn’t know why he did that; one couldn’t thus wipe out a vision which persisted in his brain.  He’d see her as she stood there every day and night until he died.  In a sweeping revulsion of feeling he saw himself all that she had named him, a great, hulking brute.  All along he had been brutal with her; he should have made due allowances; he should have been patient.  He had plunged her into an existence of which she had no foreknowledge.  He had looked to her for the sober sanity of maturity when he should have remembered how young she was, how little of real life she knew, how she had been driven to desperation by circumstances which crushed her; how she had gone sleepless, living on her nerves.  He had held her weak and worthless and without spirit or character.  And now he could only see her standing up before him, white but valiant, defying him, unafraid, welcoming death rather than yield to him.  He would have given ten years off the span of his life to have the deed of one mad moment wiped clean.