Not till on the point of leaving did she remember the painting.  It lay unharmed where it had fallen when Victor seized her veil.  She was calm enough now to consider herself fortunate in finding it so poorly secured in its frame; without the latter it would be far easier to smuggle the canvas away under her cloak.

In the final glance she bent upon Victor’s beaten and insensible body there was no pity, no regret, no trace of compunction.  What he had suffered he had ten times—­no, a hundred, a thousand—­earned.  Long before she left him Sofia had lost count of the blows she had taken at his hands, the insults worse than blows, the lesser indignities innumerable.

But in those abolished days she had never once struck back, she had been faint of heart, cowed and terrified, and had lacked what two years of separation had given her, that spiritual independence which never before had been able to realize itself, lift up its head, and grow strong in the assurance of its own integrity.

Two years ago she would not have dared to lift a hand to Victor, no matter how sore the provocation.  To-night—­if she had one regret it was that she had struck so feebly:  not that she desired his death, but that she knew it was now her life or his.  She knew the man too well to flatter herself that he would rest before he had compassed such revenge as the baseness of his degenerate soul would deem adequate.  Half the world were not too much to put between them if she were now to sleep of nights in comfortable consciousness of security from his quenchless hatred.

Callously enough she switched off the lights and left him lying there, in darkness but for the ash-dimmed glimmer of a dying fire.

In the entrance hallway she hesitated, coldly composed and alert.  But seemingly the noise of their struggle had not carried beyond the door.  There was no one about.

With neither haste nor faltering, without the least misadventure, she let herself quietly out into the empty, silent, rain-swept street, and scurried toward the lights of Piccadilly.

Before long a cruising four-wheeler overhauled her.  In its obscure and stuffy refuge she sat hugging her precious canvas and pondering her plight.

It was borne in upon her that she would do well to leave London, yes, and England, too, before Victor recovered sufficiently to scheme and put a watch upon her movements.

She had need henceforth to be swift and wary and shrewd....

A singular elation began to colour her temper, a quickening sense of emancipation.  Necessity at a stroke had set her free.  Because she must fly and hide to save her life, society had no more hold upon her, she need no longer fight to keep up appearances in spite of her status as a woman living apart from her husband, little better than a divorcee—­an estate anathema to the English of those days.

She experienced, through the play of her imagination upon this new and startling conception of life, an intoxicating prelibation of freedom such as she had never dreamed to savour.