e thundered out
his rabid and distorted prayer. "'Their throat is an open sepulcher:
they flatter with their tongue.... Destroy them, O God: let them perish
through their own imaginations.'"...

When Tollman's delirium had burned him into a temporary exhaustion he
collapsed into a chair and at his feet, forgotten now, fell the envelope
which he had flaunted vainly before the eyes of the transgressors. They
had escaped, not scourged or harrowed according to their deserts, but
smiling like sleepy children, through the door of unconsciousness and
oblivion. Gropingly his fingers went again into his pocket and came out
holding the envelope out of which he had taken the death tablets. They,
too, had betrayed him. Instead of torture they had brought the peace of
Nirvana.

From the limp fingers of the demented creature who sat gazing at his two
victims, the envelope fluttered down. Except for the mad embers of the
eyes, one might have said that the room held three dead bodies.

At least he had sent them on to a judgment from which they could not
escape with iniquitous smiles.

Then a sudden doubt assailed him. Were they, after all, dead?

He came to his foot, moving with the spasmodic jerkiness of his
condition, but with all the augmented strength of a madman's power.

To his crazed investigation their wrists betrayed no pulse and their
lips, no breath. Then they were dead!

With an inarticulate exclamation, like the oath of a man devoid of
speech, he ripped the sheer and ribboned silk from his wife's breast, as
savagely as though he were tearing the flesh itself, and laid his hand
upon the bared bosom. There, too, was the unfluttering stillness of a
lifeless heart.

Then straightening up, he gazed down on her, loathing all the beauty
which had once allured him and which now dedicated itself, in death, to
the benediction of a smile turned toward her lover.

Already mad, his lunacy became a perversion of deviltry. He lifted the
unstirring body and posed it in a relaxed attitude of ease upon the
broad couch that stood at one side of the hearth. Back of the bared
shoulders, he heaped cushions, so that she seemed the voluptuous figure
of a woman who abandons herself to as irresponsible a gratification of
sense as a purring tigress. The fire, playing on the ivory of her cheeks
and the bosom more softly white than the checks, seemed to awaken a
ghost of flickering mockery about her smiling lips.

Then, drawing upon his un