He flung her down; knotted the ends of the scarf about her sandals; crowded over her. The lecherous look of him silenced any protest. His eyes were aflame and from his whole person fumed that ruddy effluvium which came of his concentration. As measured by the slow approach of his face to hers, a death-time of dreading thoughts preoccupied Dolores. Fragile as were her bonds, she could not throw them off. Her resistance, she knew, was weakening. Suppose her mind consented; what then? Repeatedly had he forced her to his evil will; at times had justified his boast of making her like--almost love him. Now he was overcoming her as by a drug, none the easier to resist because she knew it to be the soporific of sin. Did soul-lust, then, beget soul-lust? Could he make her crave him to some mental excess? Could spirit be welded with spirit in such infernal way that the conscience would be raped as bodies were raped on Earth--ruined for progress and admittance among unsullied consciences after That Day? And the outcome of such a ghoulish union? What manner of offspring would be theirs--if offspring indeed there might be--child-fiend incarnate--spirit-spawn of the passion of an unbodied god? For her to have begotten the heir-apparent of Gehenna--that would prove righteous the Judgments of Men, even should the Greater Judge consider revoking her decree. Never again could she hope to see John Cabot and her babe. And yet--and yet---- She had fought her fight with such strength as she could command. What though she lost her own immortal soul through weakness--had not weakness as well as strength been given unto her? She had not been wasted. She had saved those two best-beloved. And, in saving them, had she not saved the greater part of herself? All her loyalty had gone with John. Their babe was the bloom of her heart, that “one, half-blown rose” of the doomed gardener’s plea. The safety of them who were all the good in her she had bought. Surely the rest of her did not matter much. Why now haggle over the price? The query dismissed her resistance. Her mind opened to her master’s mind, her eyes to his eyes, her lips to his lips. A hideous impulse moved her, like the mania to leap from some incalculable height. Thought-pulse for thought-pulse, her sensation roused to his. A moan of torturing expectance escaped her.... She closed her eyes.... _She wanted to want him._ In the blackness, Dolores saw the blacker truth. Her swooning sense of obligation to self was shocked into revival. Not him so much as something in herself must she resist--that desire put in woman to be mothers of men. Response meant utter degradation. More culpable than he who had not known the uplift of true love, she would sink lower far in hate’s degeneration. Down and down ... always down ... forever and forever down.... “I am a woman soul--I must have love to live, not lust!”