“He did what I should have liked to do,” she said aloud.  “We are not so different, after all.  He is primitive at bottom, and so am I. He gets carried away by his emotions, and so do I.”

She took up the whip, examined it, felt its weight, and drew it with a swift jerk through the air.

“I did not even shrink when Krool came stumbling down the stairs, with this cutting his flesh,” she said to herself.  “Somehow it all seemed natural and right.  What has come to me?  Are all my finer senses dead?  Am I just one of the crude human things who lived a million years ago, and who lives again as crude as those; with only the outer things changed?  Then I wore the skins of wild animals, and now I do the same, just the same; with what we call more taste perhaps, because we have ceased to see the beauty in the natural thing.”

She touched the little band of grey fur at the sleeve of her clinging velvet gown.  “Just a little distance away—­that is all.”

Suddenly a light flashed up in her eyes, and her face flushed as though some one had angered her.  She seized the whip again.  “Yes, I could have seen him whipped to death before my eyes—­the coward, the abject coward.  He did not speak for me; he did not defend me; he did not deny.  He let Ian think—­death was too kind to him.  How dared he hurt me so! . . .  Death is so easy a way out, but he would not have taken it.  No, no, no, it was not suicide; some one killed him.  He could never have taken his own life—­never.  He had not the courage....  No; he died of poison or was strangled.  Who did it?  Who did it?  Was it Rudyard?  Was it. . . ?  Oh, it wears me out—­thinking, thinking, thinking!”

She sat down and buried her face in her hands.  “I am doomed—­doomed,” she moaned.  “I was doomed from the start.  It must always have been so, whatever I did.  I would do it again, whatever I did; I know I would do it again, being what I was.  It was in my veins, in my blood from the start, from the very first days of my life.”

All at once there flashed through her mind again, as on that night so many centuries ago, when she had slept the last sleep of her life as it was, Swinburne’s lines on Baudelaire: 

“There is no help for these things, none to mend and none to mar; Not all our songs, oh, friend, can make death clear Or make life durable....”

“‘There is no help for these things,’” she repeated with a sigh which seemed to tear her heart in twain.  “All gone—­all.  What is there left to do?  If death could make it better for any one, how easy!  But everything would be known—­somehow the world would know, and every one would suffer more.  Not now—­no, not now.  I must live on, but not here.  I must go away.  I must find a place to go where Rudyard will not come.  There is no place so far but it is not far enough.  I am twenty-five, and all is over—­all is done for me.  I have nothing that I want to keep, there is nothing that I want to do except to go—­to go and to be alone.  Alone, always alone now.  It is either that, or be Jezebel, or—­”