"Yes, and it was a shock to me I'll never get over. I don't know whether I could have done as much for her under similar circumstances, with two children clinging to me and life depending on a moment's time perhaps. But she did it, swiftly and beautifully. To tell you the truth, I've quite fallen in love with her. She is a wonderful little woman. I've been sitting here for hours wondering at the meanness of a man who could desert her. Those great soulful eyes of hers! When I looked up into them, crying like a poor coward for life--I, who had robbed her of what she held dearer than life--I saw only a tender mother's soul looking down at me. Frank, I fear your spell over me is broken. You're a poor piece of clay. The blaze in that car lit up some corners of my soul I never saw before. I think I'll despise all men and love all women after to-day. What fools and puppets we are!" The man made no reply. He only looked out the window at the flying landscape and saw the sweet face of a little girl. CHAPTER XXVII VENUS VICTRIX The flames of those burning cars, leaping into the skies above the tops of the storm-tossed trees, had lighted some dark places in Gordon's soul, and he was sobered by the revelation. The clasp of Ruth's arms about his neck, the warm touch of her plump figure, the pressure of her lips on his, and the passionate murmur of the low contralto voice in his ears, "My own dear love!" thrilled him with tenderest memories. He sat by Kate's side brooding over the days and nights of their married life. Baffled and puzzled, his mind would come back with everlasting persistence to the strange feeling that held him to Ruth--a subtle and sweet mystery, the most intimate relation the soul and body can ever bear on earth, the union in love in the morning of life and its tender blossoming into a living babe. He began to ask himself had not their being mingled somehow in essence? Had they not been really united by that vital process which sometimes makes married people grow to look alike, and often to die on the same day? Intimately he knew this little woman, to her deepest soul secrets, and yet she had still eluded him, and now revealed subtle spiritual and physical charms he had never seen nor felt before. He was conscious at the same time of a new feeling of repulsion on Kate's part, and the thought filled him with nervous foreboding. Whatever change her disillusion had brought, his own physical infatuation for her was, if possible, deeper and more unreasonable. She could not make him quarrel, but he would sit doggedly gloating over her beauty, his gray eyes flashing and gleaming with the fever for possession that is the soul of murder. He was not long left in doubt as to the turn her thoughts had taken from the crisis through which she had passed. Her drawing-room was crowded. These receptions were protracted until long past midnight, and he had never seen her so gay or reckless in manner.