And then the inevitable began. She forgot the fire, forgot her anxieties, forgot Mrs. Wesson’s affront, forgot everything but the amusement, the passing childish amusement, of twirling around her little finger this shy clumsy boy, as she had twirled so many others, old and young, not caring afterward if she ever saw them again, but so absorbed in the sport, and in her sense of knowing how to do it better than the other women--more quietly, more insidiously, without ogling, bridling or grimacing--that sometimes she used to ask herself with a shiver: “What was the gift given to me for?” Yes; it always amused her at first: the gradual dawn of attraction in eyes that had regarded her with indifference, the blood rising to the face, the way she could turn and twist the talk as though she had her victim on a leash, spinning him after her down winding paths of sentimentality, irony, caprice ... and leaving him, with beating heart and dazzled eyes, to visions of an all-promising morrow.... “My only accomplishment!” she murmured to herself as she rose from the table followed by young Wesson’s fascinated gaze, while already, on her own lips, she felt the taste of cinders. “But at any rate,” she thought, “he’ll hold his tongue about having seen me at the fire.” V She let herself in with her latch-key, glanced at the notes and letters on the hall-table (the old habit of allowing nothing to escape her), and stole up through the darkness to her room. A fire still glowed in the chimney, and its light fell on two vases of crimson roses. The room was full of their scent. Mrs. Hazeldean frowned, and then shrugged her shoulders. It had been a mistake, after all, to let it appear that she was indifferent to the flowers; she must remember to thank Susan for rescuing them. She began to undress, hastily yet clumsily, as if her deft fingers were all thumbs; but first, detaching the two faded pink roses from her bosom, she put them with a reverent touch into a glass on the toilet-table. Then, slipping on her dressing-gown, she stole to her husband’s door. It was shut, and she leaned her ear to the keyhole. After a moment she caught his breathing, heavy, as it always was when he had a cold, but regular, untroubled.... With a sigh of relief she tiptoed back. Her uncovered bed, with its fresh pillows and satin coverlet, sent her a rosy invitation; but she cowered down by the fire, hugging her knees and staring into the coals. “So _that’s_ what it feels like!” she repeated. It was the first time in her life that she had ever been deliberately “cut”; and the cut was a deadly injury in old New York. For Sabina Wesson to have used it, consciously, deliberately--for there was no doubt that she had purposely advanced toward her victim--she must have done so with intent to kill. And to risk that, she must have been sure of her facts, sure of corroborating witnesses, sure of being backed up by all her clan.