"Into the hall--on the sofa--at the end--and watch by her," said Del, in quick, jerking tones. Her eyes were ablaze, her breath came in gusts. Without waiting to see where he went with his burden, she rushed down the broad steps and through the crowd, pushing them this way and that. She faced Arden Wilmot--not a lady, but a woman, a flaming torch of outraged human feeling. "You lie!" she cried, and he seemed to wither before her. "You lie about him and about her! You, with the very clothes you're dressed in, the very liquor you're drunk with, the very pistol that shot him down, paid for by _her_ earnings! He never offended you--not by look or word. You murdered him--I saw--heard. You murdered the man she was to marry, the man she loved--murdered him because she loved him. Look at him!" The crowd widened its circle before the sweep of her arm. Lorry's blood-stained body came into view. His face, beautiful and, in its pale calm, stronger than life, was open to the paling sky. "There lies a man," she sobbed, and her tears were of the kind that make the fires of passion burn the fiercer. "A man any woman with a woman's heart would have been proud to be loved by. And you--you've murdered him!" "Take care, Mrs. Hargrave," a voice whispered in her ear. "They'll lynch him." "And why not?" she cried out. "Why should such a creature live?" A hundred men were reaching for Arden, and from the crowd rose that hoarse, low, hideous sound which is the first deep bay of the unleashed blood-madness. "No, no!" she begged in horror, and waved them back. "Adelaide!" gasped Arden, wrenching himself free and crouching at her feet and clinging to her skirts. "Save me! I only did my duty as a gentleman." She looked down at him in unpitying scorn, then out at the crowd. "Hear that!" she cried, with a wild, terrible laugh. "A gentleman! Yes, that's true--a gentleman. Saving your sister from the coarse contamination of an honest man!" Then to the men who were dragging at him: "No, I say--_no_! Let him alone! Don't touch the creature! He'll only foul your hands." And she pushed them back. "Let him live. What worse fate could he have than to be pointed at every day of a long life as the worthless drunken thing who murdered a man, and then tried to save himself by defaming his victim and his own sister?"