But always there was a price which had to be paid. With the ending of the picture or the closing of the book a reaction would set in, and she would sit shivering, fearful, visualizing herself, not in the role of the furtive, tormented slayer--even when that slayer was a woman--but _as the victim_. The victim of the very violence she had welcomed and embraced, with wildly beating heart, when she had thought of it as happening to someone else. She could not have explained this aberration even to herself, and the impulse to succumb to it, to make herself agonizingly vulnerable by seeking out a certain movie or a certain book, would come upon her only at times. This Friday morning, however, Helen Lathrup was in an entirely different mood. She was almost trembling now in her impatience to get on with the day's work, to make every minute count, precisely as she had determined to do on the long, frustrating ride from her home to the office. She picked up the mail which lay before her, looked through it, and leaned toward the intercom to summon her secretary. The door of the office opened then, and someone she was not expecting to see until later in the morning, someone whose presence at that exact moment was distasteful to her, stared at her unsmilingly and closed the door again very firmly by backing up against it. The intruder made no attempt to apologize for the outrageousness of such behavior--made no effort, in fact, to speak at all. The gun in the intruder's hand was long-barreled, black and ugly-looking and capped by a silencer. It was pointed directly at her. The intruder's eyes were half-lidded, but when the light in the room shifted a little the lids went up, disclosing a cold rage and a firmness of purpose that told Helen Lathrup at once that she was in the deadliest kind of danger. It was not in her nature to remain immobile when a threat confronted her. Neither was it in her nature to remain silent. She rose slowly, keeping her eyes trained on the intruder's face, displaying no visible trace of fear. Her voice, when she spoke, was coldly contemptuous and tinged with anger. "Why are you pointing that gun at me?" she demanded. "What do you want? I'm not afraid of you." Still without uttering a word the intruder grimaced vindictively, took a slow step forwards, raised the gun a little and shot Helen Lathrup through the head. The gun's recoil was violent, the report quite loud. A silenced gun is not silent. It can be heard from a considerable distance. But the intruder appeared either willing to accept that risk, or had discounted it in advance as of no great importance. Helen Lathrup did not cry out, and the impact of the bullet did not hurl her backwards, for the bullet passed completely through her head and the weapon had been fired at no more than medium-close range.