Page:The Baron of Diamond Tail (1923).pdf/276

 Teresa, her eyes so great they seemed all white, stopped in the door, her hands clasped, her lips silently forming the words of her appeal.

Alma felt as if her bones had turned to marrow, her flesh to snow. She saw everything in the keenest sense of detail, even to the slender stream of blue smoke that rose from the end of Thomson's cigar, and thought that it burned avidly, as if in a hurry to be reduced to ashes and done with his vile mouth. She noted how the books lay on the table, and that certain ones were not where they had been when she waited in that room after Nearing's arrival home, while he talked with Aunt Hope.

She felt her thoughts leap and surge like a confined blaze as she crossed the narrow room at Findlay's side; it seemed as if her soul had taken fire and sought in frantic haste the exit to freedom that it could not find. She did not know, now that the moment had come, whether her heart and hand would fail in the horrible deed she had set for herself to do; she did not know whether it were better to smirch her soul with a thing so foul, or smirch her body in the passive purchase of immunity for the craven man who drove her to this pass.

She was weak, she was cold; her limbs trembled, her heart beat low as in one from whom life stands at the door ready to flee away. Findlay had not spoken a word to her. Perhaps if he would speak, the straining doubt of this moment might resolve into some definite thing.

Must she strike, holding his hand as Teresa had said,