ok her to realise that
the second apparition was Nick, or if she had known it from the first.
She felt herself hovering upon the brink of a great emptiness, a void
immense, and yet all her senses were alive and tingling with horror.
With agonised perception of what was passing, she yet felt numbed: as
though her body were dead, but still contained a vital, tortured soul.

And it was thus that she presently saw Nick's face bent above the
black-bearded face of his enemy; and remembered suddenly and horribly
a picture she had once seen of the devil in the wilderness.

With his knees he was gripping the writhing body of his fallen foe.
With his hands--it came upon her as she watched with a shock of
anguished comprehension--he was deliberately and with deadly intention
choking out the man's life.

"Curse you! Die!" she heard him say and his voice sounded like the
snarl of a wild beast. His upper lip was drawn back, the lower one was
between his teeth, and from it the blood dripped continuously upon his
hands and upon the dark throat he gripped.

"Give me that knife!" he suddenly said, with an upward jerk of the
head.

A dagger was lying almost within his reach, close to her foot. She
could have kicked it towards him had not her body been fast bound in
that deathly inertia. But her whole soul rose up in wild revolt at
the order. She tried to cry out, to implore him to have mercy, but
she could not make a sound. She could only stand in frozen horror, and
witness this awful thing.

She saw Nick shift his grip to one hand and reach out with the other
for the weapon. He grasped it and recovered himself. A great darkness
was descending upon her, but it did not come at once. It hovered
before her eyes, and seemed to pass, and again she saw the horror
at her feet; saw Nick, bent to destroy like an eagle above his prey,
merciless, full of strength, terrible; saw the man beneath him,
writhing, convulsed, tortured; saw his upturned face, and starting
eyes; saw the sudden downward swoop of Nick's right hand, the flash of
the descending steel.

In her agony she burst the spell that bound her, and shrieking turned
to flee from that awful sight.

But even as she moved, the darkness came suddenly back upon her,
enveloping her, overwhelming her--a darkness that could be felt. For
a little she fought against it frantically, impotently. Then her feet
seemed to totter over the edge of a dreadful, formless silence. She
knew that she f