er will, she did not regret it.

She leaned back and looked at Beatrice during several minutes, smiling
to herself from time to time, scornfully and cruelly. Then she rose and
locked the outer door and closed the inner one carefully. She knew from
long ago that no sound could then find its way to the corridor without.
She came back and sat down again, and again looked at the sleeping face,
and she admitted for the hundredth time that evening, that Beatrice was
very beautiful.

"If he could see us now!" she exclaimed aloud.

The thought suggested something to her. She would like to see herself
beside this other woman and compare the beauty he loved with the beauty
that could not touch him. It was very easy. She found a small mirror,
and set it up upon the back of the sofa, on a level with Beatrice's
head. Then she changed the position of the lamp and looked at herself,
and touched her hair, and smoothed her brow, and loosened the black lace
about her white throat. And she looked from herself to Beatrice, and
back to herself again, many times.

"It is strange that black should suit us both so well--she so dark and I
so fair!" she said. "She will look well when she is dead."

She gazed again for many seconds at the sleeping woman.

"But he will not see her, then," she added, rising to her feet and
laying the mirror on the table.

She began to walk up and down the room as was her habit when in deep
thought, turning over in her mind the deed to be done and the surest and
best way of doing it. It never occurred to her that Beatrice could
be allowed to live beyond that night. If the woman had been but an
unconscious obstacle in her path Unorna would have spared her life, but
as matters stood, she had no inclination to be merciful.

There was nothing to prevent the possibility of a meeting between
Beatrice and the Wanderer, if Beatrice remained alive. They were in
the same city together, and their paths might cross at any moment.
The Wanderer had forgotten, but it was not sure that the artificial
forgetfulness would be proof against an actual sight of the woman once
so dearly loved. The same consideration was true of Beatrice. She, too,
might be made to forget, though it was always an experiment of uncertain
issue and of more than uncertain result, even when successful, so far as
duration was concerned. Unorna reasoned coldly with herself, recalling
all that Keyork Arabian had told her and all that she had read. She
tr