ology the door
opened, and Lady Arabella March entered the room. I had seen her coming
through the great window. Without a word she crossed the room and stood
beside Mr. Caswall. It really was very like a fight of a peculiar kind;
and the longer it was sustained the more earnest--the fiercer--it grew.
That combination of forces--the over-lord, the white woman, and the black
man--would have cost some--probably all of them--their lives in the
Southern States of America. To us it was simply horrible. But all that
you can understand. This time, to go on in sporting phrase, it was
understood by all to be a 'fight to a finish,' and the mixed group did
not slacken a moment or relax their efforts. On Lilla the strain began
to tell disastrously. She grew pale--a patchy pallor, which meant that
her nerves were out of order. She trembled like an aspen, and though she
struggled bravely, I noticed that her legs would hardly support her. A
dozen times she seemed about to collapse in a faint, but each time, on
catching sight of Mimi's eyes, she made a fresh struggle and pulled
through.

"By now Mr. Caswall's face had lost its appearance of passivity. His
eyes glowed with a fiery light. He was still the old Roman in
inflexibility of purpose; but grafted on to the Roman was a new Berserker
fury. His companions in the baleful work seemed to have taken on
something of his feeling. Lady Arabella looked like a soulless, pitiless
being, not human, unless it revived old legends of transformed human
beings who had lost their humanity in some transformation or in the sweep
of natural savagery. As for the negro--well, I can only say that it was
solely due to the self-restraint which you impressed on me that I did not
wipe him out as he stood--without warning, without fair play--without a
single one of the graces of life and death. Lilla was silent in the
helpless concentration of deadly fear; Mimi was all resolve and
self-forgetfulness, so intent on the soul-struggle in which she was
engaged that there was no possibility of any other thought. As for
myself, the bonds of will which held me inactive seemed like bands of
steel which numbed all my faculties, except sight and hearing. We seemed
fixed in an _impasse_. Something must happen, though the power of
guessing was inactive. As in a dream, I saw Mimi's hand move restlessly,
as if groping for something. Mechanically it touched that of Lilla, and
in that instant she was tran