“Good. Let’s hear what it is.�
“She will go straight to—’hem!—to the devil, by the shortest route. I don’t mean in the sense in which that expression is generally used. I speak in the criminal sense. She is outside the law now. Society has turned against her, and she will take it out of society, if I am any judge of character. She was born with criminal instincts, dormant until now, but brought to the surface and made prominent by this episode in her life. She has become an Ishmaelite, with the hand of every man and woman against her, and her hand against all the world. If she had any morals of honesty, integrity, and uprightness before this thing happened, they have been burned to white ashes since the beginning of this trial. The place where she kept them is a cavity, a vacuum, now. From having been a beautiful ornament to the society which she adorned she has become a man-eating tigress to prey upon it; a parasite to cling to it, to grow and fatten upon it, and ultimately to smother and destroy the creatures who will afford her sustenance. The woman has gone out of her, Nick; the tigress has got inside. Beware of her, Nick. She hates you, and she will find a way—an unusual one, too, I think—to do you harm.â€�
“I declare, old chap, you are weaving quite a romance.�
“I am speaking earnestly, Nick.�
“Oh, I believe you; but I think you are trying to make a mountain out of a molehill.�
“Do you? Perhaps I am. But, all the same, I am mighty glad that she did not look at me in the manner she glanced toward you as she passed out of that courtroom. Beware of her, Nick, lest when she is next called upon to face a jury, charged with murder, you are not the victim of the crime.�
CHAPTER XV.
THE BIRTH OF A MYSTERY.
“The Babbington case!�
One heard those three words on the cars, in the streets, in the corridors of hotels, in parlors and dining rooms, across the breakfast table, in the lobby at the theater—everywhere one went one heard the repetition of those three words, “the Babbington case.â€�
One of the columns on the front page of every paper, morning and evening, was sure to be headed by those three words, or by others which conveyed precisely the same meaning.