parasite that battens on the
passions and vices of hopeless gaol-birds, abandoned women, jaded
pleasure-hunters and terrified neurasthenics! Pity on a speculator
calculating huge revenues from the festering putrefaction of human
disease! I haven't hit you yet, because your flesh is foul to
me--but--drink that down, or, by God! I'll smash every bone in your
face."

A gasp, a spasmodic sound of gulping, another gasp--and silence.

Two-thirds of the bottle's contents was down the man's throat. Dick
poured the remnant into his flask and sat watching the effects.

Satisfied at last that he had induced complete alcoholic coma, he
touched Amaryllis on the shoulder.

"Stop her as soon as you can," he said. "I'll drive now."

When they were off again, she asked, in a voice none too steady, what he
had been doing to the wretched man behind her.

"Made him absolutely blind--blotto," he answered.

"You sounded rather dreadful, Dick," she said; adding, after a
hesitation, "Cruel--almost."

His face was set on the road ahead of him, and his profile, she thought,
though not definitely vindictive in expression, was hard as stone.

"Cruel?" he asked.

"You said awful things in a very dreadful voice."

"The awful thoughts I had account for the voice, beloved," he explained.
"They couldn't be said to him. I thought of his hands touching you--his
voice speaking to you--you, young as an angel, as beautiful as the
goddess that floated in upon the world in a mother-of-pearl dinghy! As
clever as that other one with the fireman's tin hat, as game as Jimmy
Wilde, and as kind as Heaven. Spoke to _you_--touched you--looked at
you--blasphemy, profanation and sacrilege! And barged into your bedroom,
when--. My God! woman," cried poor Dick, as if a flame came from the
marble lips of him, "I could have watched him through an hour of rack
and thumbscrew, when I thought of you up in that room of his. It's the
cruelty I haven't done that's my claim to the next vacancy in halos.
Cruel? Just for pouring down him a few tumblerfuls of a mixture of
arrack and spud-spirit that he'd bought for his damned Caliban! And I
only did that because there weren't any handcuffs handy."

Uttered in a voice wonderfully soft, yet vibrating with a quality which
thrilled him like some tone of a celestial violin, her answering
question reached him through the rush of their speed.

"Do you love me like that?" she asked.

To the short nod of his white silhouett