He had been waiting for her with the patience and the artfulness of the hunter, but no game had ever inspired such ferocity in him as this woman, vile and little, who yet had abased him to the earth.
He was dying, but what beast full of life is more dangerous than the dying tiger?
As Berselius gazed at the woman, she, with all her will urging her body to retreat, approached him. Then, her knees touching the bed, she fell on her knees beside him and his hand fell on her shoulder.
Holding her thus, he gazed on her coldly, dispassionately, and critically, as an emperor of old might have gazed on a defaulting slave. Then, as though his anger had turned to disgust, as though disdaining to waste a word on her, he struck her full in the face with the back of his right hand, a blow that caused her to cry out and sent her groveling on the marble floor, where a moment after the nurse on duty, attracted by the cry, found her.
Berselius was dead, but the mocking smile on his lips remained, almost justified by the words of the nurse imploring the woman on the floor to calm herself and restrain her grief.
Whatever his life may have been, his death affected Adams strangely. The magnetism of the man’s character had taken a strong hold upon him, fascinating him with the fascination that strength alone can exercise. And the man he regretted was not the ambiguous being, the amended Berselius, so obviously a failure, but the real Berselius who had returned to meet death.