He stopped.  The sight which met him for the moment paralyzed both speech and motion.  Halfway across the open space, only dimly revealed in the star-light, her long hair dislodged and flying wildly about her shoulders, the gleam of the weapon in her hand, apparently stopped in the very act of flight, her eyes filled with terror staring back toward him, stood Beth Norvell.  In that first instant he saw nothing else, thought only of her; of the intense peril that had so changed the girl.  With hands outstretched he took a quick step toward her, marvelling why she crouched and shrank back before him as if in speechless fright.  Then he saw.  There between them, at his very feet, the face upturned and ghastly, the hands yet clinched as if in struggle, lay the lifeless body of Biff Farnham.  As though fascinated by the sight, Winston stared at it, involuntarily drawing away as the full measure of this awful horror dawned upon him:  she had killed him.  Driven to the deed by desperation, goaded to it by insult and injury, tried beyond all power of human endurance, she had taken the man’s life.  This fact was all he could grasp, all he could comprehend.  It shut down about him like a great blackness.  In the keen agony of that moment of comprehension Winston recalled how she had once confessed temptation to commit the deed; how she had even openly threatened it in a tempest of sudden passion, if this man should ever seek her again.  He had done so, and she had redeemed her pledge.  He had dared, and she had struck.  Under God, no one could justly blame her; yet the man’s heart sank, leaving him faint and weak, reeling like a drunken man, as he realized what this must mean—­to her, to him, to all the world.  Right or wrong, justified or unjustified, the verdict of law spelled murder; the verdict of society, ostracism.  It seemed to him that he must stifle; his brain was whirling dizzily.  He saw it all as in a flash of lightning—­the arrest, the pointing fingers, the bitterness of exposure, the cruel torture of the court, the broken-hearted woman cowering before her judges.  Oh, God! it was too much!  Yet what could he do?  How might he protect, shield her from the consequences of this awful act?  The law!  What cared he for the law, knowing the story of her life, knowing still that he loved her?  For a moment the man utterly forgot himself in the intensity of his agony for her.  This must inevitably separate them more widely than ever before; yet he would not think of that—­only of what he could do now to aid her.  He tore open his shirt, that he might have air, his dull gaze uplifting piteously from the face of the dead to the place where she stood, her hands pressed against her head, her great eyes staring at him as though she confronted a ghost.  Her very posture shocked him, it was so filled with speechless horror, so wild with undisguised terror.  Suddenly she gave utterance to a sharp cry, that was half a sob, breaking in her throat.