At her child’s cry she stuffed her fingers into her ears with savage gesture, stamped, and flung a raging glance at her lover as one who said, “How long am I to endure this?” He answered it by the movement of a beckoning finger, which brought her to his side. Then he cast a gold piece on the table, clapped his hat on his head, and together they moved towards the door. “Ah! By the blessed saints!” The Spaniard in a bound was before them. He shook the screaming infant in their faces as if it had been a weapon. “I swear this shall not be. I swear that I shall kill you and your paramour and the child and myself rather than that this shall be.” It was here that Pamela caught the little one from him. He was perhaps too far gone in passion to notice the action; perhaps he was glad to have his hands free for his fierce purpose--anyhow, he relaxed his hold. And the girl, clasping the baby in her arms, hushing it and soothing it, ran with it to the further end of the room. Sir Everard had also risen and Bellairs had started forward. But it would have been as easy to baulk a wild cat of its leap as to arrest the betrayed husband in his spring upon his betrayer. No one ever quite knew how it happened. There was the flash of a knife, an oath, and my Lord Sanquhar’s “Damn you, you would have it!” and the explosion of a pistol. The Spaniard fell without a groan, right across the doorway. Sir Everard and Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs both knew that he was a dead man before he touched the ground. “You are witness all,” said my Lord Sanquhar, “that this was in self-defence.” The woman cast a backward glance into the room. Her rich bloom had faded. She was white, but with a palpitating whiteness as of fire at its intensest, and the gaze of her great eyes was as fire too. Almost red they shone, repeating the blood fires of the rubies. Then she gave herself to Lord Sanquhar’s embrace, and together they rushed out into the night. “Odds my life!” said Mr. Bellairs, looking up at Sir Everard. He had flung himself on one knee beside the stricken man, and was going through the vain parade of seeking for a pulse which he knew no longer beat. “Did you see that, sir?” “He lifted her across her husband’s very body! He lifted her right across the body?” said Sir Everard, in a hushed voice of disgust. “Lifted her? Sir, she jumped!” Pamela kept the child’s face turned against her breast with a loving hand, and as she rocked and soothed, she herself wept as if her heart would break. Through the doors, cast open to the night, the roar of a new snow wind hurtled in upon them. There followed a sudden clamour of voices, as the host endeavoured to arrest my lord’s departure and was borne down, well-nigh annihilated, from his path; the crackling shout of my lord’s orders; the plunge and clatter of hoofs on the cobbles. It seemed as if the blood-guilty pair had gone on the wings of the storm, and that the very elements cried after them as they went.