he made toward her. "Don't, Red.
Don't!" And began to whimper in the unbeautifulness of fear, becoming
strangely smaller as her pallor mounted.

He was as terrible and as swarthy and as melodramatic as Othello.

"Don't, Red," she called still again, and it was as if her voice came to
him from across a bog.

He was standing with one knee dug into the couch, straining her head
back against the wall, his hand on her forehead and the beautiful
flexing arch of her neck rising ... swanlike.

"Watch out!" There was a raw nail in the wall where a picture had hung.
Murphy had kept knocking it awry and she had removed it. "Watch out,
Red! No-o--no--"

Through the star-spangled red he glimpsed her once where the hair swept
off her brow, and for the moment, to his blurred craziness, it was as if
through the red her brow was shotted with little scars and pock marks
from glass, and a hot surge of unaccountable sickness fanned the
enormous silence of his rage.

With or without his knowing it, that raw nail drove slowly home to the
rear of Winnie's left ear, upward toward the cerebellum as he tilted and
tilted, and the convex curve of her neck mounted like a bow stretched
outward.

* * * * *

There was little about Jason's trial to entitle it to more than a
back-page paragraph in the dailies. He sat through those days, that
were crisscrossed with prison bars, much like those drowned figures
encountered by deep-sea divers, which, seated upright in death, are
pressed down by the waters of unreality.

It is doubtful if he spoke a hundred words during the lean, celled weeks
of his waiting, and then with a vacuous sort of apathy and solely upon
advice of counsel. Even when he took the stand, undramatically, his
voice, without even a plating of zest for life, was like some old drum
with the parchment too tired to vibrate.

Women, however, cried over him and the storm in his eyes and the
curiously downy back of his neck where the last of his youth still
marked him.

To Sara, from her place in the first row, on those not infrequent
occasions when his eyes fumbled for hers, he seemed to drown in her
gaze--back--somewhere--

On a Friday at high noon the jury adjourned, the judge charging it with
a solemnity that rang up to wise old rafters and down into one woman's
thirsty soul like life-giving waters.

In part he told the twelve men about to file out, "If there has been
anything in my attitude du