"Yassah, yassah, I fetch her! I fetch her!" As he flew through the door he repeated humbly:
"I fetch her, right away, sah—right away, sah!"
Cleo watched his cowardly desertion with lips curled in scorn.
CHAPTER XXVII
A SURPRISE
For a while Norton stood with folded arms gazing at Cleo, his eyes smouldering fires of wonder and loathing. The woman was trembling beneath his fierce scrutiny, but he evidently had not noted the fact. His mind was busy with a bigger problem of character and the possible depths to which a human being might fall and still retain the human form. He was wondering how a man of his birth and breeding, the heir to centuries of culture and refinement, of high thinking and noble aspirations, could ever have sunk to the level of this yellow animal—this bundle of rags and coarse flesh! It was incredible! His loathing for her was surpassed by one thing only—his hatred of himself.
He was free in this moment as never before. In the fearlessness of death soul and body stood erect and gazed calmly out on time and eternity.
There was one thing about the woman he couldn't understand. That she was without moral scruple—that she was absolutely unmoral in her fundamental being—he could easily believe. In fact, he could believe nothing else. That she would not hesitate to defy every law of God or man to gain her end, he never doubted for a moment. But that a creature of her cunning and trained intelligence could deliberately destroy herself by such an act of mad revenge was unreasonable. He began dimly to suspect that her plans had gone awry. How completely she had been crushed by her own trap he could not yet guess.