"He may come in here and arrest me," she said.
He shook his head.
"I don't think so. And, if he does, Walbrough and I'll be right down after you. You'd better let me go."
She made no further protest. Suddenly, unaccountably, she wanted him to go.
[XXIII]
Up in her room, alternating between moments of almost hysterical defiance when she would stare through the window-panes at Spofford, and moments when she would hurl herself upon the narrow bed, she waited for Randall's return.
Somewhere she had read, or heard, that murder was not a bailable offense. That meant that she would be detained in prison, awaiting trial. With a curious detachment, she studied herself. As though she were some formless spirit, remote, yet infinitely near, she looked at Clancy Deane. How silly it all was—how futile! Billions of humans had conspired together, had laid down for themselves millions of queer rules, transgression of which was so simple a matter that she wondered that any one avoided it.
For a moment she had that odd clairvoyance that comes to persons who, by some quirk of fate, are compelled to think for themselves. She might escape from the present net, but what nets would the demon set for her in the years to come? Would she avoid them all? A horror of the future, a future in which she saw herself eternally attempting extrication from the inextricable, loomed before her.