There was still immense excitement in the streets. The papers were being sold as fast as they could be supplied. Men of all classes stopped under street lamps or before the blaze of shop windows to read the news. William Massarene had the apotheosis which he would have desired. All London was in agitation at the news of his death. There could scarcely have been more interest displayed if a German army had landed at Southsea or a French flotilla bombarded Dover. The crime was a sensational one; the mystery enshrouding it added to its tragedy; and the victim had that power over the modern mind which only capitalists now hold. The horror which was in the atmosphere was in herself, and yet what an ecstasy of relief came with it! When she reached her sister’s house she hurried up the stairs and shut herself in her bedchamber, dismissing her maid for the moment. She walked up and down the room in breathless excitation. She longed, oh! how she longed, to see the brute lying dead! How she would have liked to take a knife and cut and slash the lifeless body, and box the deaf ears, and strike the soundless mouth. She understood how people in revolution had sated their hatred in the mutilation and the outrage of dead men and women. She would have liked to tear his corpse limb from limb and fling his flesh to starving hounds. Who was the assassin? How she would have rewarded him had it been in her power for that straight, sure, deadly shot! She would have had him fed from gold and silver, and clad in purple and fine linen for all the rest of his days. She would have kissed the barrel of the revolver that had done the deed, she would have cradled the weapon between her white breasts, like a sucking child! No one, she thought, had ever hated another human being as she had hated William Massarene. And who could tell whether she was wholly freed from him by his death? Was it such entire release as she had thought? She shuddered as she remembered that he had never given her back her own receipt about Beaumont, or Beaumont’s to him. He had kept them no doubt locked in his iron safe as witnesses against her. There, of course, his lawyers or executors would find them, and they would pass into his daughter’s possession with all other documents eventually. There was, possibly, the hope that he might have provided for their transmission to herself, but she did not think so; it would not be in keeping with his brutality and his greed to have provided for her safety after his decease. If he had not left those signatures to herself they would be inevitably discovered by his men of business, and be made public as a part of monies due to him. All the unutterable torment which she had sold herself to the Minotaur to escape would again be her portion. She would be at Katherine Massarene’s mercy!