“Let me pass!” insisted the widow, beginning to feel terrified, “I do not wish him to look at you.”
“Oh! that’s cruel now, and the boy so like his father!”
“So like his father! Did you know him, then?”
“I did not know your husband; but I did know this child’s father,” was the answer.
“No! you did not—you could not. The thing is quite impossible. No one ever knew him.”
The old woman laughed. “I must have another look,” she said, attempting to seize upon the child, who uttered a sudden cry.
Presently a form came leaping through the hall, uttering a shriek with every bound. Her hair streamed backward, her eyes blazed, her arms were outstretched. She rushed forward, like a bird of prey with its spoil in sight. Her hands fell with a clutch upon that meagre woman, shaking her in every limb as they seized upon her shoulders.
“Ha! ha! I have found you at last,” cried she, “touch him, touch him, oh! touch him, and I’ll—”
Elsie paused a moment, and stealing both hands slowly from the shoulders to the throat of the old woman, clutched it, turning her head backward and saying to Catharine, “May I? shall I? She has grown into a fiend; let me choke her.”
She pleaded for permission to kill that woman as a mother pleads for the life of a child. The insane lustre of her eyes grew brighter, her pale hands quivered eagerly about the lean throat upon which they had not yet firmly closed. She was pleading for permission to kill the woman as if she had been a serpent.