“Damn you, I’ll have an answer! I’ll kill you if you don’t speak. What? You infernal skunk, do you think I’d stick at killing you? There’s nothing I’d enjoy more.” There followed a dreadful series of sounds as of something being banged against the wall by which she stood, and then suddenly there came a terrific blow against the door itself. A cry followed the blow—a gurgling terrible cry, and it did for Frances what nothing else could have done; it gave her strength to act. She could have made her escape in that moment, but the bare thought was gone from her mind. She sprang to the door, and threw it open. Then she saw that which she had already beheld that evening, but with unseeing eyes—the big man in the ulster who had waited just below her in the rain at the theatre steps half-an-hour before. He was holding Rotherby between his hands as he might have held a sack of meal, and banging his head against everything hard in the vicinity. Rotherby was struggling with gasping, broken oaths for freedom, but he was utterly outmatched. As Frances flung open the door he fell backwards at her feet, and the man who gripped him proceeded furiously to stand over him and bang his head upon the floor. “Oh, stop!” Frances cried in horror. “Oh, for God’s sake, stop!” He stopped. Her voice seemed to have an almost miraculous effect upon him. He stopped. But he knelt upon Rotherby, holding him down, and his face, suffused with passion, was to her the most appalling sight she had ever beheld. There followed an awful silence, during which he remained quite motionless, bent over his enemy. Rotherby was bleeding profusely at the nose, but he was half-stunned and seemed unaware of it. His arms were flung wide, and his hands opened and shut convulsively, in a manner that made the onlooker shudder. How long that fearful silence lasted she never knew. It seemed to stretch out interminably into minutes so weighted with dread that each was like an hour. At last, when she could endure no longer, huskily, with tremendous effort, she spoke. “Do you want—to kill him?” He raised his head slowly and looked at her. His eyes were bloodshot and the veins of his temples visibly throbbing, but the rest of his face was ghastly white. He looked at her, and she felt a quick, piercing pain at her heart that made her catch her breath. “I have wanted to kill him for years,” he said. “Do you value his life? If not——” It was terrible, it was monstrous; but it was real. He was asking her—actually asking her, as a victorious gladiator in the arena—for permission to despatch his victim. And even as he spoke, she saw his right hand move towards the throat of the prostrate man. She cried out wildly at the sight, in an anguish of horror. “Arthur, no—no—no! That’s murder! Arthur,—stop!” “He is worse than a murderer,” Arthur said in the same fatalistic tone. “Ah, no!” she made gasping answer. “And you! And you!” “And—you!” he said, with terrible emphasis.