gain.... The Duchess
looked at the plain roofs that lay dry and sterile beneath the torrid
sky and wished, not by any means for the first time, that she had left
that marriage with Roddy alone.

Roddy would have married some other girl, Nita Raseley or such, and he
would have been mine ... mine!

Hard and utterly selfish in all her ordinary dealings with a world that
she professed to despise but really adored, her love for Roddy was a
little golden link to a thousand softnesses and, as she termed them,
weak indulgences. Why had she loved him so? She was like the grim pirate
of some conventional fiction. See him on his dark vessel surveying with
cold and cruel eye the beautiful captives provided by the stricken ship,
on every side of him! See him select, for the very flavour that the
contrast gave him, some ordinary slave from the crowd to whom he shows
weak indulgence! So much blacker, he feels, does this kindness make his
infamies.

But the Duchess's career as the dark pirate of her period was swiftly
vanishing; the black hulk of her vessel remained, but upon its boards
only the little slave was to be seen, and even he, with furtive eye,
sought his way of escape.

Yes, on this torrid evening every soul in that vast city, surely, felt
that he was alone, abandoned, in a desert of a world. But the fear that
she was losing even Roddy brought the Duchess very close to panic. She
had not grasped before how resolutely she had been using him to bolster
up life for her, how important his friendly existence was for her.

Since his marriage that friendliness had grown, with every hour,
weaker. Something she must do now to repair her error of the other day;
she was even ready to pretend affection for her granddaughter if that
would bring Roddy back to her.

She watched the sky and longed for the threatened storm to break; her
bones were indeed old and feeble to-day, to move at all was an effort
and, with it all, there was a sense of apprehension as though she were
some terrified bird conscious of the hawk's approach, she who had, until
now, been herself the hawk. She remembered the day when she had realized
more poignantly than ever before, that the hour must come--and indeed
was not far away--when she would inevitably meet death. She had loathed
that realization, attempted to defy it, been defeated by it. Now on this
evening, she suspected again the invasion of that same power. But
to-night there was no resistance in her,