“Adelaide!” gasped Arden, wrenching himself free and crouching at her feet and clinging to her skirts.  “Save me!  I only did my duty as a gentleman.”

She looked down at him in unpitying scorn, then out at the crowd.  “Hear that!” she cried, with a wild, terrible laugh.  “A gentleman!  Yes, that’s true—­a gentleman.  Saving your sister from the coarse contamination of an honest man!” Then to the men who were dragging at him:  “No, I say—­no!  Let him alone!  Don’t touch the creature!  He’ll only foul your hands.”  And she pushed them back.  “Let him live.  What worse fate could he have than to be pointed at every day of a long life as the worthless drunken thing who murdered a man, and then tried to save himself by defaming his victim and his own sister?”

Under cover of her barrier of command, the constable led Arden into the house, past where his sister lay in a swoon, and by the back way got him to jail.  The crowd, fascinated by her beauty, which the tempest of passion had transfigured into terrible and compelling majesty, was completely under her control.  She stayed on, facing that throng of men, many of whom she knew by name, until Lorry’s body was taken away.  She was about to go into the house, as the crowd began quietly to disperse, when there arose a murmur that made her turn quickly toward the doors.  There was Estelle, all disheveled and bloodstained.  Her face was like death; her movements were like one walking in a deep sleep as she descended to the lawn and came toward them.

“Where is he?  Where is he?” she wailed, pushing this way and that through the crowd, her hands outstretched, her long fair hair streaming like a bridal veil.  Her feet slipped on the wet grass—­where it was wet with his blood.  She staggered, swayed uncertainly, fell with her arms outstretched as if the earth were he she sought.  She lay there moaning—­the cry of her tortured nerves alone, for her mind was unconscious.

Adelaide and Madelene, who had just come, bent to lift her.  But their strength failed them and they sank to their knees in terror; for, from the silent crowd there burst a shriek:  “Kill him, kill him!” And all in an instant the grounds were emptied of those thousands; and to the two women came an ever fainter but not less awful roar as the mob swept on uptown toward the jail.

Madelene was first to recover.  “Let us carry her in,” she said.  And when the limp form was once more on the big sofa and the eyelids were trembling to unclose, she ripped open the right sleeve and thrust in the needle that gives oblivion.

Adelaide went to the window and listened.  Before her in the moonlight was the place where that tempest of hate and murder had burst and raged.  Once more her heart hardened in the pitiless fury of outraged mercy.  A moan from Estelle stung her, and she leaned forward the better to catch the music of the mob’s distant shriek.  Silence for full five minutes; then a sound like that which bursts from the throats of the bloodhounds as they bury their fangs in their quarry.  She gave a faint scream, covered her face.  “Oh, spare him!  Spare him!” she cried.  And she sank to the floor in a faint, for she knew that Arden Wilmot was dead.