There was a long pause, a sinister lull in the tempest of passion which was raging in that quiet, prosaic room. Gasping with impotent passion, Maunders lay, resting his head against the door, an obstacle which prevented the guilty woman from escaping. Not that she attempted to escape. With a deadly white face, with steady, cold, malignant eyes, like those of a snake, and with a contemptuous smile on her thin lips. The Spider, visible at last in all her brazen wickedness, stood defiantly at bay. Towton, with Ida clinging to his arm almost terrified out of her senses, stared aghast at the evil being who had been such a curse to many. The ominous silence was like the year-long moment before the bursting of a bomb. Ida, with chattering teeth and trembling limbs, was the first to recover the use of her tongue; but she could scarcely form the words. "Oh, God! oh, God!" she whimpered, hiding her face on her lover's breast; "it's too awful. I never thought--I never thought--oh--oh--oh!" She broke down with a strange, hysterical, choking cry, and would have fallen to the ground but that the Colonel placed her gently in a near chair. Then he turned with military precision to face Miss Hest. "You are The Spider?" he asked in dry, precise tones, and now entirely master of himself. "Yes," she replied coolly, and her mouth closed with a triumphant snap. "You infernal fiend----" "Gently! Gently! Hard names break no bones, Colonel. You should be more of a man than to throw words at a woman." "Are you a woman?" "Yes," gasped Maunders, raising himself on his elbow and wiping the froth from his pale lips; "she is Frances Hest right enough. Her brother is a myth invented by herself to mask her devilries. But Frances or Francis--she is The Spider!" "I did not mean that exactly," said Towton in his hard voice; "but I asked if one capable of the enormities credited to The Spider can possibly be a woman." "I am The Spider," said Miss Hest with a shrug. "There is your answer." "You are a demon." "More names! Really, Colonel Towton, you are very childish. You sink to the level of that fool," and she pointed scornfully to Ida, who was weeping in the chair as though her heart would break. "To think that I should have been her friend," moaned Ida with a fresh burst of tears and hiding her face. "You little fool," said Frances in a gentle, dangerous voice. "I have been a better friend to you than you think. But that I pitied you as being a poor, weak, silly worm, I would have murdered you long ago." "You murdered my father," shivered Ida, not daring to meet the cold eyes which rested on her prostrate form. "Martin Dimsdale was not your father." "You--you--you murdered him." "Yes, I did." "What!" Towton could scarcely believe his ears. "You admit the crime?" Frances yawned ostentatiously. "If I admit that I am The Spider it follows that I must have murdered Dimsdale."