I would rather die than be brought to safety by you. If I cannot
find the way home without your help, I do not want ever to get home. I
am not afraid of you or your rope. I had rather feel a clean rope across
my shoulders until they were bloody than your vile hand on mine."

"You will do what I tell you to do," he said thickly. "It is the only
way. I will make you."

Blazing eyes burning in a death-white face gave him his only answer.
His own face now was no less white; iron-bodied as he was, he was
trembling. Yet he lifted the rope. To strike the second blow. Not just
to frighten her, but to strike. She read his purpose clearly, and she
could not restrain a shudder of her flesh. But she did not draw back
from him, and she did not cry out. She meant what she had said, or what
some re-born Gloria had said for her; he might kill her, but she would
not follow him.

And then Mark King, as he was about to strike, stayed his hand at the
last moment and hurled the rope far from him, and whirled about and left
her.

_Chapter XXVI_

Someway he came to the base of the cliffs. He was outside; he was in the
open. And yet he struggled blindly through a pit of gloom. He was
conscious of but one fact in all the world; about it everything else
turned and spun as sweep the bodies of the sky about the sun. He had
lifted his hand against a woman. He, Mark King, had struck a woman. He
had struck Gloria. His friend's daughter--Ben's daughter. He had struck
her.... What had come over him? Had he gone mad? Stark, staring, raving
mad? He knew all along that his nerves were on edge, raw and quivering.
But no jangling nerves explained a thing like that. He, who had held
himself a man, had struck a woman--a girl! A little, defenceless girl.

"My God!" he groaned.

He stumbled on. He did not know where he was going or why. He ran his
hand across his eyes again and again. He didn't know why he did that;
one couldn't thus wipe out a vision which persisted in his brain. He'd
see her as she stood there every day and night until he died. In a
sweeping revulsion of feeling he saw himself all that she had named him,
a great, hulking brute. All along he had been brutal with her; he
should have made due allowances; he should have been patient. He had
plunged her into an existence of which she had no foreknowledge. He had
looked to her for the sober sanity of maturity when he should have
remembered how young she was, how little of real life