Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/399

 ancestor of hers, torturing an enemy at the stake, could have taken keener delight in the pain he inflicted than Lahleet Marceau when she saw Henry Harrington writhing as from a fatal wound. She gazed at his unseeing face quite merciless, with the corners of her lips turned up. Ruthlessly she was killing something—not him but something in him that must hurt him all but mortally when it died.

That it could so hurt him was more nearly true than the single-minded Lahleet could have conceived; for love had been Henry Harrington's whole life for three years now. Why had he chosen all at once to strive and struggle up to where he had become a target? It was for love. What had blinded his eyes till he could so be made the victim of this designing group of men? It was love. Why had it hurt so when they hurled him down? Because he was in love. It was in the love chambers of his heart that he had suffered the agony that had so weakened him. And now he was understanding that he had loved a woman whose heart was calculatingly hard.

"And she knew I was innocent all the while?" he iterated once more, opening and closing his hands helplessly.

"She rather thought the more you suffered the quicker you'd come to your senses," explained Lahleet, hands casually busy with her back hair.

"Senses!" Harrington roared out angrily; and then broke swiftly away—away from the torturing voice which had told him these unpalatable truths, away too from the unpleasant conspicuousness of the place in which he had been standing. With no more design than that he blundered, by the simple accident of walking