He was certainly a murderer; over the threshold of that hideous fact she must step before she could enter her palace of insubstantial delights. Stained she must take even the phantom of his hand, or not at all. Suppose the joy were to leave her, but the horror to remain? She closed her eyes. But she opened them again. She faced it. Say he was--that; what then? The joy and the horror were fatally one. A man capable of all--all--even of that--and her lover! Oh, the moment the shudder had passed the worst was over! He had killed; yes, but for a cause! He had been horribly to be feared; yes, but without the dread of him too she would not have had the whole of him, and she wanted the whole of him. _Not_ kill, with such a reason? Withhold death, with something approaching that was worse than death? Oh, Louie knew all about that; Miss Cora had told her.... A murder? There were things by the side of which a murder, once you had made up your mind to it, was a trifle! * * * * * Are women so? Is it so that they will place their soft hands, like willow-leaves, in those other hands that may be black with dreadful work, red with destruction, yet, seeing less than man and more than man, they care not? Is it so that they will set their lips, as if for a kiss, against the mouth of war itself with its ten thousand deaths? It seems to be so. Their loved ones, when they die, do not do so of fevers and shattered tissues, but of their own clear and trusted heroism. "Go," they say to the next one, even to the little Jimmy, "go--and come back if you may--and, though wooden props keep you together, you shall be beautiful to the mother who bore you--to the wife whose task it must be to take you to pieces and put you together again--to the woman who, because of her own heavenly dreaming, cannot think of the fiend you were in that hour when the call sounded and you dropped the point of your lance to the charge." * * * * * But one thing was clear: her dreams must remain dreams. If she would keep what was left her, she must never, never, never see him now! PART V THE CONSOLIDATION I The habit of sitting for artists leaves its mark on a woman. This mark is the lack of mystery--the "looked at" appearance. But it has its compensations. Chief of these are a physical unconsciousness, an absence of coquetry, and a liberation of the mind so complete that a sudden recall has all the effects of shock. Thus, a model posing for a whole class of men has been known to faint because she has been seen through the skylight by a "man" who mended the roof.