ling. Now--sit--down--"

"No, you haven't," she said, a sort of wild joy coming out in her
whisper, and cunningly twisting the upper half of her body back from
his, the hand still held high. "You'll never get me--you fish!"

And plunged with her high hand in a straight line down into her throat.

It was only when the coroner withdrew the sliver of paper knife from its
whiteness, that, coagulated, the dead and waiting blood began to ooze.

* * * * *

"Do you," intoned the judge for the third and slightly more impatient
time, "plead guilty or not guilty to the charge of murder against you?"

This time the lips of the prisoner's wound of a mouth moved stiffly
together:

"Guilty."

ROULETTE

I

Snow in the village of Vodna can have the quality of hot white plush
of enormous nap, so dryly thick it packs into the angles where fences
cross, sealing up the windward sides of houses, rippling in great seas
across open places, flaming in brilliancy against the boles of ever so
occasional trees, and tucking in the houses up to the sills and down
over the eaves.

Out in the wide places it is like a smile on a dead face, this snow
hush, grateful that peace can be so utter. It is the silence of a broody
God, and out of that frozen pause, in a house tucked up to the sills and
down to the eaves, Sara Turkletaub was prematurely taken with the pangs
of childbirth, and in the thin dawn, without even benefit of midwife,
twin sons were born.

Sturdy sons, with something even in their first crescendo wails that
bespoke the good heritage of a father's love-of-life and a mother's
life-of-love.

No Sicilian sunrise was ever more glossy with the patina of hope
than the iced one that crept in for a look at the wide-faced,
high-cheek-boned beauty of Sara Turkletaub as she lay with her sons to
the miracle of her full breasts, her hair still rumpled with the agony
of deliverance. So sweetly moist her eyes that Mosher Turkletaub, his
own brow damp from sweat of her writhings, was full of heartbeat, even
to his temples.

Long before moontime, as if by magic of the brittle air, the tidings had
spread through the village, and that night, until the hand-hewn rafters
rang, the house of Turkletaub heralded with twofold and world-old fervor
the advent of the man-child. And through it all--the steaming warmth,
the laughter through bushy beards, the ministering of women wise and
foolish with the memory