They would warm over and republish all the sensational details which time had cooled.  The story she had refused to write, others would not refuse to write—­neither would they refuse to “color” certain scenes into “drama.”

The girl, lying in her bed, pressed her fore-arms against her eyes and struggled to shut out the pictures that rose as horrors in her mind—­but they passed and repassed with fiendish pertinacity.  Nightmare shapes leered at her from gargoyle features.

To any human being a situation is what it seems to be.

Had she actually, like the Lady Godiva, been called upon to ride the length of Broadway, clad only in her beautiful hair, and placarded “Burton’s Sister and Edwardes’ Fiancee,” it could have meant to her delicacy of feeling no greater trial, no more truly the denuding of herself to the public gaze.

Had all this realization not been so keen and so poignant Mary Burton would not have fought so long against the idea which seemed to open the only way.

Were there just herself she would, before considering such desecration of every sacred memory, have preferred to stuff with paper the crannies of that wind-rattled window and to turn on the gas.  In comparison this would have been easy.

Easy!  Suddenly the idea became a soul-clutching temptation.  It offered escape from the horror of decision and action; escape, too, from the haunting of memory.  The woman sat up in bed and her eyes gazed feverishly ahead through the dark.  She trembled violently and the plan invitingly unfolded.  Some unseen devil’s advocate was urging her, for the instant half-persuading her, insinuating and luring.  Often as a very little girl she had slept in a room as bare as this and listened contentedly to the rattle of storm-shaken shutters.  She had cuddled, a warm, soft shape, under the blankets, and sunk sweetly, dreamily into unconsciousness and happy dreams.  It was so easy!  There, in a drawer where she had thrust it, with abhorrence for the emblem of a contemptible weakness, was Paul’s hypodermic needle.  This very night she could again drift, unresisting, into sleep, and while she slept the gas-jet could flow free.

The room was cold.  Sitting upright in her bed, she shivered.  Then, as she realized how seriously she had yielded for a panic-ridden moment to the temptation of turning her back on life’s need of courage, the shiver grew from a shudder of the flesh to a shudder of the soul.  She lay down again and hid her face in the pillow.

From the next room she heard the heavy snore of her father and the gentler sleeping breath of her mother.  Personal preferences and prejudices belonged to the past.

Very well—­she still had the flaming Burton courage.  She would do this hateful thing, and when she gazed on the eyes that glutted their curiosity with staring, she would meet them serenely and give them no sign that she was being tortured.