“Take me! Take me—but save him!” she pleaded. “Good God, it’s not just you I want—it’s—it’s your feelin’s, it’s your love that I’ve got to have!” “Oh!” she moaned, covering her face with her hands. “It’s a queer way of makin’ love, eh?—but I mean it! And I want to know if you’re goin’ to swing in with me and get taken care of, or not?” “Oh, you fool, you fool!” she cried suddenly, smiting the air with her vehemently closed fists. “You poor, miserable fool! I loathe and hate the very sound of your voice! I despise every inch of your brutish, bloated body! I’d die—I’d kill myself ten times over before I’d so much as touch you!” He looked at her gathering storm of rage, first in wonder, and then in a slow and deadly anger that blanched his face and left only the two claret-colored blotches on his withered cheeks. “I’ll give you one last chance,” he said, clenching his flaccid jaw. “Chance! I don’t want a chance! Now I know how things _must_ go! Now I know how to act! And before we settle it between us, and if I have to—to lose everything, I want you to know one thing. I want you to know that I’m doing it for Durkin! I’m doing it all, everything, for _him_!” “For Durkin?” he choked, with an oath. “What are you fightin’ for that washed-out welcher for?” “Because Durkin is my husband!” she said, in her ashen white determination, as she stepped quickly to the door and double-locked it. “And because I would _die_ for him”—she laughed shrilly, horribly, as she said it—“before I’d see him hurt or unhappy!” She stood firmly with her back against the door, panting a little, her jaw fallen loosely down, her eyes luminous with their animal-like fire. “Then, by God, you _will_!” said MacNutt in his raucous guttural, with his limbs beginning to shake as he glared at her. She stood there motionless, trying to think out the first moves in that grim game for which freedom and love and life itself were the stakes. “Then, by God, you will!” repeated MacNutt, with the sweat coming out in beads on his twitching temples. CHAPTER XXXI Frances Durkin knew the man she had to face. She knew the pagan and primordial malevolence of the being, the almost demoniacal passions that could sweep through him. More than once she had seen his obsessions tremble on the verge of utter madness. She had come to know the rat-like pertinacity, the morbid, dementating narrowness of mind, that made him what he was. In his artful and ruthless campaign against Penfield, in his relentless crushing of old-time confederates, in each and all of his earlier underground adventures, she had seen the sullen, bulldog, brutal contumacy of the man.