not. He would give it--he! Ay, mock as thou wilt!
But between his high honour and love and me thy carrion _shall_ not
come!"

By her great divan the dead man had fallen, and so near to it he lay that
one arm was hidden by the draperies; and at this moment this she
saw--before having seemed to see nothing but the death in his face. A
thought came to her like a flame lit on a sudden, and springing high the
instant the match struck the fuel it leaped from. It was a thought so
daring and so strange that even she gasped once, being appalled, and her
hands, stealing to her brow, clutched at the hair that grew there,
feeling it seem to rise and stand erect.

"Is it madness to so dare?" she said hoarsely, and for an instant,
shuddering, hid her eyes, but then uncovered and showed them burning.
"Nay! not as I will dare it," she said, "for it will make me steel. You
fell well," she said to the stone-faced thing, "and as you lie there,
seem to tell me what to do, in your own despite. You would not have so
helped me had you known. Now 'tis 'twixt Fate and I--a human thing--who
is but a hunted woman."

She put her strong hand forth and thrust him--he was already
stiffening--backward from the shoulder, there being no shrinking on her
face as she felt his flesh yield beneath her touch, for she had passed
the barrier lying between that which is mere life and that which is
pitiless hell, and could feel naught that was human. A poor wild beast
at bay, pressed on all sides by dogs, by huntsmen, by resistless weapons,
by Nature's pitiless self--glaring with bloodshot eyes, panting, with
fangs bared in the savagery of its unfriended agony--might feel thus.
'Tis but a hunted beast; but 'tis alone, and faces so the terror and
anguish of death.

The thing gazing with its set sneer, and moving but stiffly, she put
forth another hand upon its side and thrust it farther backward until it
lay stretched beneath the great broad seat, its glazed and open eyes
seeming to stare upward blankly at the low roof of its strange prison;
she thrust it farther backward still, and letting the draperies fall,
steadily and with care so rearranged them that all was safe and hid from
sight.

"Until to-night," she said, "You will lie well there. And then--and
then--"

She picked up the long silken lock of hair which lay like a serpent at
her feet, and threw it into the fire, watching it burn, as all hair
burns, with slow hissing, and she watched it