or everything; and after that, in the hot
rainy night, the flight afoot across weary miles of soaking cross
streets and up through ill-lighted, shabby avenues to the one place of
refuge left open to them. They had learned from the newspapers, at once
a guide and a bane, a friend and a dogging enemy, that the place was
locked up, now that the police had got through searching it, and that
the coroner's people held the keys. And the woman knew of a faulty catch
on a rear cellar window, and so, in a fit of stark desperation bordering
on lunacy, back they ran, like a pair of spent foxes circling to a
burrow from which they have been smoked out.

Again it was the woman who picked for her companion the easiest path
through the inky-black alley, and with her own hands she pulled down
noiselessly the broken slats of the rotting wooden wall at the back of
the house. And then, soon, they were inside, with the reeking heat of
the boxed-up house and the knowledge that at any moment discovery might
come bursting in upon them--inside with their busy thoughts and the busy
green flies. How persistent the things were--shake them off a hundred
times and back they came buzzing! And where had they all come from?
There had been none of them about before, surely, and now their
maddening, everlasting droning filled the ear. And what nasty creatures
they were, forever cleaning their shiny wings and rubbing the ends of
their forelegs together with the loathsome suggestion of little
grave-diggers anointing their palms. To the woman, at least, these flies
almost made bearable the realization that, at best, this stopping point
could be only a temporary one, and that within a few hours a fresh start
must somehow be made, with fresh dangers to face at every turning.

* * * * *

It was during this last hideous day of flight and terror that the thing
which had been growing in the back part of the brain of each of them
began to assume shape and a definite aspect. The man had the craftier
mind, but the woman had a woman's intuition, and she already had read
his thoughts while yet he had no clue to hers. For the primal instinct
of self-preservation, blazing up high, had burned away the bond of bogus
love that held them together while they were putting her drunkard of a
husband out of the way, and now there only remained to tie them fast
this partnership of a common guilt.

In these last few hours they had both come to kno