“What hotel?”

“The Sunderland Hotel—­Alderney Street.”

“Go on.”

“I waited in the rooms.”

“Rooms!  You mean one room, you slut!”

“No, there were four rooms—­a grand suite.”

“Go on.”

“He said he would come to me next day, or Sunday at latest.  And he didn’t come on Saturday—­I stopped indoors all day, afraid to go out for fear of meeting you—­and he didn’t come till Sunday, after lunch.”

“Ah!  How long did he stay?”

“Till early this morning.  Will, let me be—­I’m done.  You’re throttling me.”

“Go on.  I’ll ’aarve it all out of you.  Begin at the beginning.  It’s Sunday afternoon we’re talking of—­ever since lunch time.  There’s a many hours to amuse yourselves.”

“After dinner he made me dress up.”

“What d’you mean?”

“He had brought things in his luggage—­fancy dress.”

“What dresses?”

“Oh, boy’s things—­things he’d bought in Turkey, on his travels.  He made me act that I was his page—­and bring the coffee, and sit cross-legged on the ground.”

“Go on.”

“No—­what’s the use?” She was crying now.  “Oh, God have mercy, what’s the use?”

“Go on.”

“No.  Kill me, if you want to, and be done with it.  I don’t care—­I’m tired out.  What I’ve gone through was worse than death.  I’m not afraid of dying.”

She would tell him no more; she defied him; and yet he did not kill her.  She lay weeping, moaning, at intervals, repeating that desolate phrase, “What’s the use?  Oh, what’s the use?”

Irremediable loss—­it sounded in her voice, it crept coldly in his burning veins, it came spreading, flooding, filling the whole earth in the first faint glimmer of dawn.  He sat on the edge of the bed, let his hands fall heavy and inert between his knees, and for a long time did not change his attitude.

Just now, looking down at her, he had felt a sickness of loathing.  He hated her for the musical note of her voice, the tragic eloquence of her eyes, and above all he hated her for her nakedness.  The almost nude sprawling form seemed to symbolize the unspeakable shame of his sex.  This was the disgusting female, round and smooth, white and weak, with tumbling hair and lying lips, the lewd parasite that can drag the noble male down into hell-fire.  Now he looked at her with comparative indifference, and felt even pity for the broken and soiled thing that he had believed to be clean and sound.

The fusion of his thoughts was over.  One thought had split away from all the rest, and every moment was becoming more definite, more logical, more full of excruciating pain.  He thought now only of his enemy, of the human fiend who had destroyed Mavis and himself.

At least she had been innocent once.  She was clean and good—­really and truly the candid child that she had never ceased to seem to be—­when that sliming, crawling reptile first got his coils about her.  As he thought of the maddening reality, his imagination made pictures that printed themselves, deep and indelible, on the soft recording surfaces of his brain.  Henceforth, so long as blood pumped, nerves worked, and cells and fibers held to their shape, he would see these pictures—­must see them each time that chance stirred his memory of the facts for which they stood as emblems.