were down there, she
wished they would go in and throttle her father. He was the author of
all her misery; and was any woman on earth so miserable as she? Why
should he live, exist down there like a beast in his cave, when his
death would give her liberty?--a poignant happiness in itself. She
wondered did she kill him should she be hanged? They rarely hanged
anybody in California, never when there was gold to rattle
contemptuously in the face of the law; why should she not deliver her
mother and herself? They would both be in an asylum for the mad, or dead
before their time, unless he went soon; and their lives were of several
times more value than his. They, at least, had ruined the lives of no
one, and with his hoarded unsavoury millions they would gladly do good
to hundreds.

She tiptoed out into the hall, and leaned over the circular railing, and
peered down into the space below. Only an old-fashioned waxen taper
burned in a cup of oil; it emitted a feeble and ghostly light. The large
webs of the spiders quivered in a draught. They assumed strange
distorted shapes and seemed to point long fingers at her father's door.

They are the ghosts that once animated the skeletons, she thought; and
they think it time he joined them.

She stood there for a long while, her eyes narrowed in a hard searching
regard; the trembling gloom with the tiny sallow flame in its middle
suggested the purgatory of imaginative artists. Should she go down and
thrust the dagger into his neck?

Her thoughts were torn apart by the abrupt loud shouts of the wind. She
wondered if there were such winds anywhere else on earth, or if this
were the voice of some fiend prisoned in the Pacific,--the spouse whom
California had taken to her arms when the fires in her body were hewing
and shattering and rehewing her, and divorced in an after-desire for
beauty and peace.

Magdalena went back to her room and turned the key in the drawer which
contained the dagger.

"I must get out of this house," she said aloud, with the sensation of
dragging her will from the depths of her brain and shaking it back to
life. "If I don't, I'll be in an asylum to-morrow. Something is
certainly wrong in my head."

She put on her jacket and hat with trembling fingers. Her nerves seemed
fighting their way through her skin. Her ears were humming. Something
had begun to pound in her brain.

She ran downstairs and let herself out, averting her eyes from her
father's door.