e light of that one candle, she hardly recognized herself.
Violent sensations, deep emotions, these are the accelerations of
time. They produce--momentarily no doubt--the same effect as do the
passing of years over which such intensity of feeling is more evenly
distributed. In those few hours, since she had heard from Devenish
that another woman was claiming the attentions of Traill's mind,
Sally had aged--withered almost--in the fierce stress of her passion
of jealousy. It had passed over her like the sirocco of the desert,
leaving her parched, dried, shrivelled, as a child grown old before
its years. No colour was there in her cheeks, no vestige of the sign
that beneath a mere fraction's measurement of that white skin, the
blood was flowing through her veins. Yet the skin was not really white.
It was an ugly grey, smirched with a colour that bore but the faintest
resemblance to animation. Beneath the eyes deep shadows lay, smeared
into the sockets. She lifted the candle to their level, but they did
not disappear. Pain had cast them, and no shifting of material light
would wipe them out. But it was the eyes themselves that startled
her. When she looked into them--deep into the pupils--she realized
how close she had drifted to the moment beyond which control is of
no account--the moment of absolute madness. Even then, they
glittered unnaturally. A gleam from the candle again? She moved it
once more--this way and that--but still the light flickered there,
frightening her into a sudden effort of restraint. She tried to pull
herself together; put down the candle hurriedly and, feeling the
leathern dryness in her mouth, caught at a carafe of water, drinking
from it without use of the glass.

That steadied her. Thoughts drifted back into their channels and,
coming with them, looming with its portentous realization above the
others, the remembrance that only the evening before, he had drawn
out the settlement upon her life. Now she knew why he had done it.
Now she found the absolute trending of his mind. He had said if he
died! That was only to blind, only to tie a bandage about her eyes
in order to conceal from her the true motive that had instigated him.
But she saw the true motive now. Under the bandages she had already
tried to peer; now circumstance itself had wrenched them from her.

With feverish movements, she opened a drawer and took from it a little
slip of paper. This was a copy of the settlement as he had drawn i