But the note of panic in her voice revived my purpose. I laughed—mockingly.
"Louis!" her tone was sharp. but edged with terror. "Louis—put down that pistol! You don't know what you are doing."
She struggled to her feet and now stood before me. God! how beautiful—how tempting that bare white bosom!
"Put down that pistol!" she ordered hysterically.
She was frantic with fear. And her fear was like the blast of a forge upon the white heat of my passion.
I mocked her. A shrill maniacal laugh burst from my throat. She had said I didn't know what I was doing! Oh, yes, I did.
"I'm going to kill you!―kill you!" I shrieked, and laughed again.
She swayed forward like a wraith, as I fired. Or perhaps that was the trick played by my eyes as darkness overwhelmed me.
VII.
A few fragmentary pictures stand out in my recollection like clear-etched cameos on the scroll of the past.
One is of Louis, standing dazedly—slightly swaying as with vertigo—looking down at the smoking revolver in his hand. On the floor before him a crumpled figure in ebony and white and vivid crimson.
Then a confusion of frightened men and women in oddly assorted nondescrpt attire—uniformed officers bursting into the room and taking the revolver from Louis's unresisting hand—clumsy efforts at lifting the white-robed body to the bed—a crimson stain spreading over the sheet—a doctor, attired in collarless shirt and wearing slippers, bending over her * * *
Finally, after a lapse of hours, a hushed atmosphere—efficient nurses—the beginning of delirium.
And one other picture—of Louis, cringing behind the bars of his cell, denied the privilege of visiting his wife's bedside—crushed, dreading the hourly announcement of her death—filled with unspeakable horror of himself.
Velma still lived. The bullet had pierced her left lung and life hung by a tenuous thread. Hovering near I watched with dispassionate interest the battle for life. For the time I seemed emotionally spent. I had made a supreme effort—events would now take their inevitable course and show whether I had accomplished my purpose. I felt neither anxious nor overjoyed, neither regretful nor triumphant—merely impersonally curious.
A fever set in lessening Velma's slender chances of recovery. In her delirium, her thoughts seemed always of Louis. Sometimes she breathed his name pleadingly, tenderly, then cried out in terror at some fleeting rehearsal of the scene in which he stood before her, the glitter of insanity in his eyes, the leveled revolver in his hand. Again she pleaded with him to give up his work at the bank; and at other times she seemed to think of him as over on the battlefields of Europe.
Only once did she apparently think of me—when she whispered the name by which I had called her, "Winkie!" and added, "Dick!" But, save for this exception, it was always "Louis! Louis!"
Her constant reiteration of his name finally dispelled the apathy of my spirit.
Louis! All the vengeful fury toward him I had experience when my soul went hurtling into the region of the disembodied returned with thwarted intensity.
When Velma's fever subsided, when the long fight for recovery began and she fluttered from the borderland back into the realm of the physical, when I knew I had failed—balked of my prey, I had at least this satisfaction:
Never again would these two—the man I hated and the woman for whom I hungered—never again would they be to each other as they had been in the past. The perfection of their love had been irretrievably marred. Never would she meet his gaze without an inward shrinking. Always on his part—
