Leontine turned her face to him.  “You fool!” she whispered through livid lips.

Francis was a huge, leonine man; he rose now to his full height, as a cat rises.  But the drama drew his gaze in spite of himself; he could not keep his eyes from his wife’s face.  Leontine plucked at his sleeve and whispered again: 

“You fool!”

Something contorted the actor’s frame bitterly, and he gasped like a man throttled.  Leontine could feel his muscles stiffen.

But the two players were in Elysium.  They had reached the climax of the scene; Danton had told his love as only a great, starved love can tell itself, and with swimming eyes and fluttering lids, with heart pounding beneath her folded hands, Diane swayed toward him and his arms enfolded her.  Her body met his, yielded; her face was upturned; her fragrant, half-opened lips were crushed to his in a fierce, impassioned kiss of genuine ecstasy.

Up to this moment the intensity of Francis’s rage had held him paralyzed, despite the voice which was whispering so constantly at his ear; but now, when he saw his wife swooning upon the breast of the man who had played his part, he awoke.

“She knows he loves her,” Leontine was saying.  “You let him tell her in front of your face.  He has taken her away from you!”

Mrs. Phillips’s eyes fell upon the working fingers of the man as they rested beside her own.  They were opening and closing hungrily.  She also saw the naked knife which lay upon the table, and she moved it forward cautiously until the eager fingers twined about it.  Then she breathed, “Go!” and shoved him forward fiercely.

It was Irving Francis’s cry of rage as he rushed upon them which aroused Norma Berwynd from her dream, from her intoxication.  She saw him towering at Phillips’s back, and with a scream she tried to save the latter.

The husband’s blow fell, however; it was delivered with all the savage fury that lay in Irving Francis’s body, and his victim was fairly driven to his knees beneath it.  The latter rose, then staggered, and, half sliding through the woman’s sheltering embrace, crumpled limply into a massive upholstered chair.  He, too, was dazed by the sudden transition from his real world to his make-believe.

When his eyes cleared he saw Norma Berwynd struggling with her husband, interposing her own slender body in his path.  Francis was cursing her foully for her unfaithfulness; his voice was thick and brutal.

“Yes!  It’s true!” she cried, with hysterical defiance.  “I never knew till now; but it’s true!  It’s true!”

“You’ve killed him!” Leontine chattered, shrilly, and emerged from the shadows, her dark features ashen, her eyes ringed with white.  Mrs. Francis turned from her husband and flung her arms about the recumbent man, calling wildly to him.

The denouement had come with such swiftness that it left all four of them appalled at their actions.  Seeing what his brief insanity had led him into, Francis felt his strength evaporate; his face went white, his legs buckled beneath him.  He scanned the place wildly in search of means of escape.