"Ask that woman how I came here; ask her how she has treated me. But I escaped from the room she locked me in by climbing out of the window. Now I shall show her the mercy she has shown me. She is----"
Frances darted forward and clapped her hand on his mouth. "I'll kill you if you say the word. You cursed fool. Be silent or I give you up." Maunders, with a strength which his frail looks scarcely suggested, threw her off and staggered against the door. "I give _you_ up," he shrieked, wild with anger, "you thief, you blackmailer, you murderess!"
"What?" cried Towton eagerly, and grasping vaguely at the terrible truth.
"Yes." Maunders pointed an accusing finger at Frances Hest. "There is The Spider. A woman; a devil! Arrest her; imprison her; hang her on the gallows," and he sank down on the floor, his back to the door, with hatred written on his white and ghastly face.
[CHAPTER XXI.]
JUSTICE.
There was a long pause, a sinister lull in the tempest of passion which was raging in that quiet, prosaic room. Gasping with impotent passion, Maunders lay, resting his head against the door, an obstacle which prevented the guilty woman from escaping. Not that she attempted to escape. With a deadly white face, with steady, cold, malignant eyes, like those of a snake, and with a contemptuous smile on her thin lips. The Spider, visible at last in all her brazen wickedness, stood defiantly at bay. Towton, with Ida clinging to his arm almost terrified out of her senses, stared aghast at the evil being who had been such a curse to many. The ominous silence was like the year-long moment before the bursting of a bomb.
Ida, with chattering teeth and trembling limbs, was the first to recover the use of her tongue; but she could scarcely form the words. "Oh, God! oh, God!" she whimpered, hiding her face on her lover's breast; "it's too awful. I never thought--I never thought--oh--oh--oh!" She broke down with a strange, hysterical, choking cry, and would have fallen to the ground but that the Colonel placed her gently in a near chair.
Then he turned with military precision to face Miss Hest. "You are The Spider?" he asked in dry, precise tones, and now entirely master of himself.
"Yes," she replied coolly, and her mouth closed with a triumphant snap.