Page:In the name of a woman (1900).djvu/14

 back the cry was uttered for the third time, while I caught the sounds of struggling.

There was a light in one of the lower rooms, the long casement window of which stood partly open, and the beams came straggling in a thin line between some nearly closed curtains. With a spring I caught the ledge, and, drawing up my head level with the window, looked in.

What I saw told me that my worst fears were being realised. The woman who had passed me in the street was struggling with frantic effort to hold the door of the room against someone who was fighting to get in. Her cloak was off, and her head and face uncovered. She was a tall, lithe, strenuous creature, obviously of great strength and determination, and the whiteness of the face, now set and resolute, was thrown up into the strongest contrast by a mass of bright red hair, some of which the fierceness of the struggle had loosened. She was striving and straining with enormous energy, despite the fact that she was bleeding badly from a wound somewhere in the shoulder or upper arm.

As I glanced in, she turned her head in my direction with the look of a tigress at bay; and I guessed that she was calculating the possibilities of escape by means of the window. But the momentary relaxation of her resistance gave the men a better chance, and, to my horror, I saw one of them get his arm in and slash and thrust at her with his knife.

She answered with a greater effort of her own, however, and succeeded in jamming the man's arm between the door and the lintel, making him cry out with an oath that reached me.

But so unequal a struggle could only end in one