The sweetest and best and most exalted moment she
had ever known was being made bitter as gall, sickening, hateful.
She must speak openly, she must make him understand.
"Allie Lee! ... At my house!" burst out Stanton, and then, as if
struck by lightning she grew cold, stiff-lipped.
The change in Neale was swift, terrible. Not comprehension, but
passion transformed him into a gray-faced man, amazed, furious,
agonized, acting in seeming righteous and passionate repudiation of
a sacrilege.
"------!" His voice hurled out a heinous name, the one epithet that
could inflame and burn and curl Beauty Stanton's soul into hellish
revolt. Gray as ashes, fire-eyed, he appeared about to kill her. He
struck her--hard--across the mouth.
"Don't breathe that name!"
Beauty Stanton's fear suddenly broke. Blindly she ran out into the
street. She fell once--jostled against a rail. The lights blurred;
the street seemed wavering; the noise about her filtered through
deadened ears; the stalking figures before her were indistinct and
unreal.
"He struck me! He called me------!" she gasped. And the exaltation
of the last hour vanished as if it had never been. All the passion
of her stained and evil years leaped into ascendency. "Hell--hell!
I'll have him knifed--I'll see him dying! I'll wet my hands in his
blood! I'll spit in his face as he dies!"
So she gasped out, staggering along the street toward her house.
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