ers: "--Just a Levantine thief, after all! Not a thing to shoot.
Not a man. No! But a giant cockroach from the tropics. Ugh! Too large
to place one's foot upon!----"

She came leisurely forward, halted, inspected him with laughing
insolence:

"And the others--Kastner, Sondheim--and the other vermin? You were
quite right. Why should I kill them--merely because to-day a real man
died? What if they are the same species of vermin that slew Vanya
Tchernov? They are not men to pay for it. My pistol could not make a
dead man out of a live louse! No, you are quite correct. You know your
own kind. It would be no compliment to Vanya if I should give these
vermin the death that real men die!"

Puma stood close to the door, furtively passing a thick tongue over
his dry, blanched lips.

"Then you will not interfere?" he asked softly.

She shrugged her shoulders: one was bare with the torn sleeve
dangling. "No," she said wearily. "Run home, painted pig. After all,
the world is mostly swine.... I, too, it seems----" She half raised
her arms, but the gesture failed, and she stood thinking again and
staring at the curtained window. She did not hear him leave.

CHAPTER XXIII

In the strange, springlike weather which prevailed during the last
days of January, Vanya was buried under skies as fleecy blue as
April's, and Marya Lanois went back to the studio apartment where she
and Vanya had lived together. And here, alone, in the first month of
the new year, she picked up again the ravelled threads of life,
undecided whether to untangle them or to cut them short and move on
once more to further misadventure; or to Vanya; or somewhere--or
perhaps nowhere. So, pending some decision, she left her pistol
loaded.

Afternoon sunshine poured into the studio between antique silken
curtains, now drawn wide to the outer day for the first time since
these two young people had established for themselves a habitation.

And what, heretofore, even the lighted mosque-lamps had scarcely half
revealed, now lay exposed to outer air and daylight, gilded by the
sun--cabinets and chests of ancient lacquer; deep-toned carpets in
which slumbered jewelled fires of Asia; carved gods from the East,
crusted with soft gold; and tapestries of silk shot with amethyst and
saffron, centred by dragons and guarded by the burning pearl.

Over all these, and the great mosque lantern drooping from above, the
false-spring sunshine fell; and through every open