Page:The Great Secret.djvu/176

160 watch a comrade struggling against death on the face of a giddy precipice to flinging a bomb amongst enemies—the one was a painful and lingering effort, the other merely the devastating work of an instant.

She had watched him divest himself of his clothing on the seashore, as she shivered so wretchedly herself, and wondered how anyone could be so brave as to divest themselves on such a day, and when she saw him plunge into the icy waves she could not withhold her admiration and wonder at his resolution. She had watched him as he returned with his shapely body glowing and pink, and, even as the savagest of women would have done, she remembered these details.

It was their present surroundings which wrought the change in both natures; but now, as time passed on and each had leisure to mark the qualities of the other—the qualities which their positions alone brought out—they became natural and sentimental. They thought little of the cause to which they had devoted their lives and more of each other. They were actually becoming simple savages, prepared to vow and believe in fidelity and love, instead of being the wretched devotees of the great god "Nothing."

Dennis MacBride, however, remained in the same condition that he had always been in—a developed brute of the Bill Sykes order. He was gigantic and powerful, with a hand like a sledge-hammer, and a brain of the compass of the gorilla, and these women, who had tasted refinement and trifled with cultured men, were only women to him to caress or thrash as the mood seized him, therefore he lorded it over them and was as masterful and as coarse as a wild boar with a couple of sows who had attached themselves to him.

He did not care much how they adorned themselves