The old German woman was returning, her basket emptied of its load, when Honora came down the steps and crossed the Plaisance.

“My God,” said the old woman in her own tongue, “the child did not live!”

Honora walked as somnambulists walk, seeing nothing.  But she found her way to the door of the laboratory.  The white glare of the chemical lights was over everything—­over all the significant, familiar litter of the place.  The workmanlike room was alive and palpitating with the personality which had gone out from it—­the flaming personality of David Fulham.

The woman who had sold her birthright of charm and seduction for his sake sat down to eat her mess of pottage.  Not that she thought even as far as that.  Thought appeared to be suspended.  As a typhoon has its calm center, so the mad tumult of her spirit held a false peace.  She rested there in it, torpid as to emotion, in a curious coma.

Yet she retained her powers of observation.  She took her seat before the tanks in which she had demonstrated the correctness of David’s amazing scientific assumption.  Yet now the creatures that he had burgeoned by his skill, usurping, as it might seem to a timid mind, the very function of the Creator, looked absurd and futile—­hateful even.  For these things, bearing, as it was possible, after all, no relation to actual life, had she spent her days in desperate service.  Then, suddenly, it swept over her, like a blasting wave of ignited gas, that she never had had the pure scientific flame!  She had not worked for Truth, but that David might reap great rewards.  With her as with the cave woman, the man’s favor was the thing!  If the cave woman won his approval with base service, she, the aspiring creature of modern times, was no less the slave of her own subservient instincts!  And she had failed as the cave woman failed—­as all women seemed eventually to fail.  The ever-repeated tragedy of woman had merely been enacted once more, with herself for the sorry heroine.

Yet none of these thoughts was distinct.  They passed from her mind like the spume puffed from the wave’s crest.  She knew nothing of time.  Around her blazed and sputtered the terrible white lights.  The day waned; the darkness fell; and when night had long passed its dark meridian and the anticipatory cocks began to scent the dawn and to make their discovery known, there came a sharp knocking at the door.

It shattered Honora’s horrible reverie as if it had been an explosion.  The chambers of her ears quaked with the reverberations.  She sprang to her feet with a scream which rang through the silent building.

“Let me in!  Let me in!” called a voice.  “It’s only Kate.  Let me in, Honora, or I’ll call some one to break down the door.”

* * * * *

Kate had mercy on that distorted face which confronted her.  It was not the part of loyalty or friendship to look at it.  She turned out the spluttering, glaring lights, and quiet and shadow stole over the room.