He flung aside the revolver and seized his assailant by the throat. Holman loosened his grasp on his own weapon for purposes of self-defence, and struck wildly at the fierce, resolute face that stared back at him with the grim determination of implacable enmity in the eyes. He struck at these eyes blindly; again and again he struck with little effect; then with a snarl of rage he flung himself across the other man and fixed his teeth in his neck. Matheson felt sickened: hate of the man maddened him. It was like fighting with a wild beast, this horrible struggle with a creature that tore and bit, and uttered a snarling whine between the parted lips that was scarcely human in sound. He choked the whine into silence under the pressure of his fingers till the desperate resistance slackened, the limp body dropped inert. One minute more and he would squeeze the life out of him and fling his body out on the veld. A fierce exhilaration thrilled him. For the first time in his life the lust of killing held him; he was dominated by a passion greater, more brutal in quality, more relentless, than anything he had felt before. He experienced a savage joy in the thought of taking life. All of evil which this man had accomplished to his knowledge flooded his brain and inflamed it while he held him pinned powerless to the ground, and stared pitilessly into the protruding, agonised eyes from which terror even could not drive the malevolent hatred they expressed. And then in a moment everything was altered. With a swiftness, a silence, a curious unreality, that suggested an apparition rather than a human presence in the stupefying unexpectedness of its approach, a woman's figure emerged out of the shadows, as though, lurking there invisible, it now assumed shape for some definite purpose, and detaching itself from the gloom, became significant, alive, compelling--a power, a deterrent power, quiet and insistent, with eyes that blazed horrified reproach into the surprised, upturned gaze of the man who, kneeling there with murder in his heart, yet let his fingers insensibly relax their grip, and slowly rose to his feet, and stood shaking from head to foot like a man seized with an ague, as he faced fully the woman whom he had last seen on the morning when he had asked her to be his wife. While he faced her all the love he had ever felt for her surged anew in his heart, till the pain of it was wellnigh unbearable. What was she doing there? And why had she through her coming saved the life of a scoundrel whose destiny overshadowed her own?