n him. She remained
seated at the disordered breakfast table, a dreadfully still figure, and
sinister; a figure of stone and fire; of ice and flame. Over and over in
her mind she was milling the things she might have said to him, and had
not. She brewed a hundred vitriolic cruelties that she might have flung
in his face. She would concoct one biting brutality, and dismiss it for
a second, and abandon that for a third. She was too angry to cry--a
dangerous state in a woman. She was what is known as cold mad, so that
her mind was working clearly and with amazing swiftness, and yet as
though it were a thing detached; a thing that was no part of her.

She sat thus for the better part of an hour, motionless except for one
forefinger that was, quite unconsciously, tapping out a popular and
cheap little air that she had been strumming at the piano the evening
before, having bought it down town that same afternoon. It had struck
Orville's fancy, and she had played it over and over for him. Her right
forefinger was playing the entire tune, and something in the back of her
head was following it accurately, though the separate thinking process
was going on just the same. Her eyes were bright, and wide, and hot.
Suddenly she became conscious of the musical antics of her finger. She
folded it in with its mates, so that her hand became a fist. She stood
up and stared down at the clutter of the breakfast table. The egg--that
fateful second egg--had congealed to a mottled mess of yellow and white.
The spoon lay on the cloth. His coffee, only half consumed, showed tan
with a cold grey film over it. A slice of toast at the left of his plate
seemed to grin at her with the semi-circular wedge that he had bitten
out of it.

Terry stared down at this congealing remnant. Then she laughed, a hard,
high little laugh, pushed a plate away contemptuously with her hand, and
walked into the sitting room. On the piano was the piece of music
(Bennie Gottschalk's great song hit, "Hicky Bloo") which she had been
playing the night before. She picked it up, tore it straight across,
once, placed the pieces back to back and tore it across again. Then she
dropped the pieces to the floor.

"You bet I'm going," she said, as though concluding a train of thought.
"You just bet I'm going. Right now!"

And Terry went. She went for much the same reason as that given by the
ladye of high degree in the old English song--she who had left her lord
and bed and board