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Rh the tray, however, in walked the woman with yellow hair and statuesque figure. She wore furs, she was over-dressed and painted, she reeked of scent. To me it was a kind of nightmare vision.

Details of her long visit I remember but very few. She at once announced herself--"I am Pauline M" and asked excitedly, "Are you Blackwood?" She was in a "state." Her great figure filled the little room. She poured out a torrent of words in a cockney voice. Her face was flaming red beneath the paint. Occasionally she swept about. The name of Boyde recurred frequently. She was attacking me, I gathered. Boyde had said this and that about me. I understood less than nothing. I remember asking her to sit down, and that she refused, and that presently I asked something else: "Has he married you?" and that she suddenly caught sight of the telegrams lying on my bed--I had pointed--then picked them up and read them. She came closer to me while she did this, so that I caught the stink of spirits.

It was all very muddled and confused to me, and I made no attempt to talk. I heard her begging me to "give him back" to her, that she loved him, that I had "poisoned his mind" against her--threats and beseeching oddly mingled. But the telegrams seemed to sober her a little, for I remember her becoming abruptly more quiet, almost maudlin, and pouring out an endless story about Boyde who was, apparently, "full of money ... full of liquor" ... and full of anger against me because he had been "supporting" me and I had shown "base ingratitude."... I was too bewildered to feel much. It numbed me. I couldn't make sense of it. I couldn't realize how Boyde had deliberately left me alone so long. Something monstrous and inhuman touched it all.

She went away eventually in a calmer state, though leaving me in a condition that was far from calm. She went, begging me to "send him back" to her when he came home, but half realizing, I gathered, that the boot was on the other leg, so far as Boyde and myself were Rh