Truly, in the light of that one candle, she hardly recognized herself.  Violent sensations, deep emotions, these are the accelerations of time.  They produce—­momentarily no doubt—­the same effect as do the passing of years over which such intensity of feeling is more evenly distributed.  In those few hours, since she had heard from Devenish that another woman was claiming the attentions of Traill’s mind, Sally had aged—­withered almost—­in the fierce stress of her passion of jealousy.  It had passed over her like the sirocco of the desert, leaving her parched, dried, shrivelled, as a child grown old before its years.  No colour was there in her cheeks, no vestige of the sign that beneath a mere fraction’s measurement of that white skin, the blood was flowing through her veins.  Yet the skin was not really white.  It was an ugly grey, smirched with a colour that bore but the faintest resemblance to animation.  Beneath the eyes deep shadows lay, smeared into the sockets.  She lifted the candle to their level, but they did not disappear.  Pain had cast them, and no shifting of material light would wipe them out.  But it was the eyes themselves that startled her.  When she looked into them—­deep into the pupils—­she realized how close she had drifted to the moment beyond which control is of no account—­the moment of absolute madness.  Even then, they glittered unnaturally.  A gleam from the candle again?  She moved it once more—­this way and that—­but still the light flickered there, frightening her into a sudden effort of restraint.  She tried to pull herself together; put down the candle hurriedly and, feeling the leathern dryness in her mouth, caught at a carafe of water, drinking from it without use of the glass.

That steadied her.  Thoughts drifted back into their channels and, coming with them, looming with its portentous realization above the others, the remembrance that only the evening before, he had drawn out the settlement upon her life.  Now she knew why he had done it.  Now she found the absolute trending of his mind.  He had said if he died!  That was only to blind, only to tie a bandage about her eyes in order to conceal from her the true motive that had instigated him.  But she saw the true motive now.  Under the bandages she had already tried to peer; now circumstance itself had wrenched them from her.

With feverish movements, she opened a drawer and took from it a little slip of paper.  This was a copy of the settlement as he had drawn it out.  He had presented it to her.

“You’d better keep it as a memorandum of the details,” he had said and, without glancing at its contents, she had thrust it into this drawer.  Now she hurriedly spread it open.

“In the event of my death, or the discontinuance of the relations which now exist between Miss Sally Bishop and myself—­”