She wouldn't have done it, of course. But did she really want to send one of Lathrup's other victims to the electric chair, simply because he was a little more primitive than she could ever be and had become, for a moment, a kind of madman, driven to desperation by a wrong which, for all she knew to the contrary, might have been much greater than the one which Lathrup had inflicted on her? She suddenly remembered that there was a term for that in law which two or three states recognized as a justifiable legal defense in a first-degree murder case. An irresistible impulse. A man might know the difference between right and wrong and hence be legally sane and yet be compulsively driven to kill. It was horrible, yes. She'd always go in fear of such a man and you couldn't think of him as entirely normal and he wouldn't deserve to get off scot-free. You could be modern and enlightened and humane and fight for a more civilized legal code, but there had to be a streak of hard cruelty in all killers which set them apart from men and women who merely killed in their thoughts. Or if you wanted to think of it in another way, their ability to go all the way--irresistible impulse or not--was a very terrible thing; it did make them wild beasts in a sense, more tigerlike that the overwhelming majority of mankind. Her hands shook so she had difficulty opening her hand-bag again and putting the gun into it. But she was breathing a little more easily now, and there was a less frightened look in her eyes. The killer wouldn't know she'd found the gun, and she certainly had no intention of confronting him with it. She'd hide it somewhere or get rid of it--perhaps go right over to the East River at noon and very cautiously throw it in. Unless--she did decide to ... to go to the police. Had she any right to take so much for granted--that he wasn't a human monster who might not kill again? If she got rid of the gun she'd be committing a very serious crime. She could be sent to prison for a long term of years. An accessory to murder after the event was what concealing that kind of evidence would make her. She wasn't a criminal. She knew deep in her heart that she wasn't. But the law took a very dim view of that kind of personal interpretation of what was or wasn't a criminal act.