If he did not kill his mother, his father must. He could save them both by one brief gesture. Yet he shrank from it, fought within himself a war of loves and duties. Then he heard his mother’s wailing again and he set his teeth together fiercely, laid his hand upon the knob, turned it softly, and softly thrust the door ajar. CHAPTER L When he had been confronted with the opportunity to end the life of Immy’s baby and with it numberless perils, RoBards had hesitated until the chance was taken from him. But now he did not even question the high necessity for action. Whether he were insane from the laceration of his sympathies or superhumanly wise, his mind was made up the instant the idea came to him. As if some exterior power considered and ordained the deed, his mind was made up for him. He felt it his solemn duty to give Patty surcease of existence. He wondered only at his long delay in recognizing the compulsion. The patriarch Abraham in the Old Testament had heard a voice in the air bidding him despatch his only son for a burnt offering; he did not waver, but clave wood and piled it upon his son’s back and lured him to an altar and drew his knife against him. The curious god who could take pleasure in a child’s blood was amused at the last moment to send an angel to order the tortured old man to substitute a ram caught by his horns in the thicket. And the poor ram was burned instead. But Abraham had been ready to slash his boy’s young throat across at the divine whim and to watch him roast. There was a priestliness in RoBards’ soul, too; but he was not going to slay his wife to appease any cloudy deity. She was already a burnt offering alive and he was ordered to sacrifice her flesh to end its tyranny over her hopeless soul. He was puzzled only about the means. His brain ran along an array of weapons; knife, poison, pistol, throttling fingers. He read the list as if a hand held a scrolled catalogue before his eyes. He discarded each as it came. It was too brutal. He stared at Patty, tossing there alone, and his heart sickened with love. Then he was more than ever afraid for her. For now she was in such an extreme of blind woe that she was snatching at her hair! She had lost her last interest in beauty. She was tearing at her hair, crisscrossing it over her face, biting and gnawing at it, sawing it through her teeth. He ran to her to rescue that final grace. He took her hands from it and smoothed it back from her brow. It was soft beyond belief beneath his palm. It was deep and dense and voluptuously velvety. He knelt and, holding her hands tight, kissed her lips and her cheeks and kissed her eyelids, as if he were weighting them finally with pennies. And he groaned: “Good-by, honey!” Her eyelids opened under the kisses he had left upon them. She gasped: “Good-by? You’re not going to leave me? Don’t! ah, don’t!” He shook his head and groaned: