"Murphy was here last night!"
It had happened, in spite of a caution worthy of a finer finesse than hers, and suddenly she seemed to realize the quality of her fear for him to whom she was everything and who to her was not all.
"Don't, Red," she said, all the bars of her pretense down and dodging from his eyes rather than from any move he made toward her. "Don't, Red. Don't!" And began to whimper in the unbeautifulness of fear, becoming strangely smaller as her pallor mounted.
He was as terrible and as swarthy and as melodramatic as Othello.
"Don't, Red," she called still again, and it was as if her voice came to him from across a bog.
He was standing with one knee dug into the couch, straining her head back against the wall, his hand on her forehead and the beautiful flexing arch of her neck rising … swanlike.
"Watch out!" There was a raw nail in the wall where a picture had hung.
Murphy had kept knocking it awry and she had removed it. "Watch out,
Red! No-o—no—"
Through the star-spangled red he glimpsed her once where the hair swept off her brow, and for the moment, to his blurred craziness, it was as if through the red her brow was shotted with little scars and pock marks from glass, and a hot surge of unaccountable sickness fanned the enormous silence of his rage.
With or without his knowing it, that raw nail drove slowly home to the rear of Winnie's left ear, upward toward the cerebellum as he tilted and tilted, and the convex curve of her neck mounted like a bow stretched outward.
* * * * *