terrible," moaned Mavis.

"'Cause it's your first. When you've been here a few times, it's as
easy as kiss me 'and."

Very soon, Mavis was more than ever in the grip of the fiend who seemed
bent on torturing her without ruth. She had no idea till then of the
immense ingenuity which pain can display in its sport with prey. During
one long-drawn pang, it would seem to Mavis as if the bones in her body
were being sawn with a blunt saw; the next, she believed that her flesh
was being torn from her bones with red-hot pincers. Then would follow a
hallowed, blissful, cool interval from searing pain, which made her
think that all she had endured was well worth the suffering, so vastly
did she appreciate relief. Then she would fall to shivering. Once or
twice, it seemed that she was an instrument on which pain was
extemporising the most ingenious symphonies, each more involved than
the last. Occasionally, she would wonder if, after all, she were
mistaken, and if she were not enjoying delicious sensations of
pleasure. Then, so far as her pain-racked body would permit, she found
herself wondering at the apparently endless varieties of torment to
which the body could be subjected.

Once, she asked to look at herself in the glass. She did not recognise
anything resembling herself in the swollen, distorted features, the
distended eyes, and the dilated nostrils which she saw in the glass
which Mrs Gowler held before her. She was soon lost to all sense of her
surroundings. She feared that she was going mad. She reassured herself,
however, because, by a great effort of will, she would conjure up some
recollection of the loved one's appearance, which she saw as if from a
great distance. Then, after eternities of torment, she was possessed by
a culminating agony. Sweat ran from her pores. Every nerve in her being
vibrated with suffering, as if the accumulated pain of the ages was
being conducted through her body. More and even more pain. Then, a
supreme torment held her, which made all others seem trifling by
comparison. The next moment, a new life was born into the world--a new
life, with all its heritage of certain sorrow and possible joy; with
all its infinite sensibility to pleasure or pain, to hope and love and
disillusion.

CHAPTER THIRTY

THE "PERMANENT"

When Mavis regained a semblance of consciousness, something soft and
warm lay on her heart. Jill was watching her with anxious eyes. A queer
little female figure s