f begin to lose.
This country--this great splendid country of savages--began to take me
by the hands, began to look me in the eyes, and to ask me, '_Helena von
Ritz, what are you? What might you have been?_'

"So now," she concluded, "you asked me, asked me what I was, and I have
told you. I ask you myself, what am I, what am I to be; and I say, I am
unclean. But, being as I am, I have done what I have done. It was for a
principle--or it was--for you! I do not know."

"There are those who can be nothing else but clean," I broke out. "I
shall not endure to hear you speak thus of yourself. You--you, what have
you not done for us? Was not your mother clean in her heart? Sins such
as you mention were never those of scarlet. If you have sinned, your
sins are white as snow. I at least am confessor enough to tell you
that."

"Ah, my confessor!" She reached out her hands to me, her eyes swimming
wet. Then she pushed me back suddenly, beating with her little hands
upon my breast as though I were an enemy. "Do not!" she said. "Go!"

My eye caught sight of the great key, _Pakenham's key_, lying there on
the table. Maddened, I caught it up, and, with a quick wrench of my
naked hands, broke it in two, and threw the halves on the floor to join
the torn scroll of England's pledge.

I divided Oregon at the forty-ninth parallel, and not at fifty-four
forty, when I broke Pakenham's key. But you shall see why I have never
regretted that.

"Ask Sir Richard Pakenham if he wants his key _now!_" I said.

CHAPTER XXXIV

THE VICTORY

She will not stay the siege of loving terms,
Nor bide the encounter of assailing eyes,
Nor ope her lap to soul-seducing gold ...
For she is wise, if I can judge of her;
And fair she is, if that mine eyes be true;
And true she is, as she hath proved herself.
--_Shakespeare_.

"What have you done?" she exclaimed. "Are you mad? He may be here at any
moment now. Go, at once!"

"I shall not go!"

"My house is my own! I am my own!"

"You know it is not true, Madam!"

I saw the slow shudder that crossed her form, the the fringe of wet
which sprang to her eyelashes. Again the pleading gesture of her
half-open fingers.

"Ah, what matter?" she said. "It is only one woman more, against so
much. What is past, is past, Monsieur. Once down, a woman does not
rise."

"You forget history,--you forget the thief upon the cross!"