he could say.

"No!" he declared, vehemently, with a gesture of disgust and anger.

That, following the coarse implication of the gambler, conveyed to
Stanton what all these men imagined. The fools! The fools! A hot
vibrating change occurred in her emotion, but she controlled it. Neale
turned his back upon her. The crowd saw and many laughed. Stanton felt
the sting of her pride, the leap of her blood. She was misunderstood,
but what was that to her? As Neale stepped away she caught his arm--held
him while she tried to get close to him so she could whisper. He shook
her off. His face was black with anger. He held up one hand in a gesture
that any woman would have understood and hated. It acted powerfully upon
Beauty Stanton. Neale believed she was importuning him. To him her look,
whisper, touch had meant only the same as to these coarse human animals
gaping and grinning as they listened. The sweetest and best and most
exalted moment she had ever known was being made bitter as gall,
sickening, hateful. She must speak openly, she must make him understand.

"Allie Lee!... At my house!" burst out Stanton, and then, as if struck
by lightning she grew cold, stiff-lipped.

The change in Neale was swift, terrible. Not comprehension, but passion
transformed him into a gray-faced man, amazed, furious, agonized, acting
in seeming righteous and passionate repudiation of a sacrilege.

"------!" His voice hurled out a heinous name, the one epithet that
could inflame and burn and curl Beauty Stanton's soul into hellish
revolt. Gray as ashes, fire-eyed, he appeared about to kill her. He
struck her--hard--across the mouth.

"Don't breathe that name!"

Beauty Stanton's fear suddenly broke. Blindly she ran out into the
street. She fell once--jostled against a rail. The lights blurred; the
street seemed wavering; the noise about her filtered through deadened
ears; the stalking figures before her were indistinct and unreal.

"He struck me! He called me------!" she gasped. And the exaltation of
the last hour vanished as if it had never been. All the passion of her
stained and evil years leaped into ascendency. "Hell--hell! I'll have
him knifed--I'll see him dying! I'll wet my hands in his blood! I'll
spit in his face as he dies!"

So she gasped out, staggering along the street toward her house. There
is no flame of hate so sudden and terrible and intense as that of
the lost woman. Beauty Stanton's blood had turned to vitriol. Men ha