He heard the revolver clatter to the floor. She writhed in his embrace. He had expected the perfect response. Meeting an abrupt refusal, he was taken off his guard, and she escaped from him.
She staggered into a corner. The devil that possessed him had lost its power over her. She had reverted to her natural being. She did not cry, but she stood there with her hands pressed tight against her breast, the fingers mechanically busied with repairing the opened blouse, her face all horror at the thing she had been.
"What must you think of me?" she was moaning—"I don't know what came over me!—What must you think of me?"
He thought nothing. He could think nothing. He could realize only that he was again to be robbed. Twice to-night the cheat that played with men at the game of life had given him the winning hand, only to sweep the stakes from the board just as Luke reached for what he had won. The blood-lust changed its form; it assumed an ungovernable fury. Something crackled in his brain as he had seen imperfect feed-wires at the touch of a trolley-wheel. The crimson veil fluttered again before his eyes.
He turned and bolted the door. He turned again and ran to her. His face was wet with sweat, black with powder, terrible.
She understood. She lowered her head and tried to dodge past him. She cried out.
His strong fingers caught her hair. The hair streamed down. Her forward lurch brought it taut. He jerked at it; she fell toward him. His free hand caught her throat and stopped her fall. He tossed her against the table; her feet brushed the floor, but he pressed her shoulders tight to the table's top. He bent over her, one hand at her throat, the other raised to stop her mouth, his beating breath on her face.
She was wholly in his power now. The outside world was impotent because the outside world could not have heeded her appeal; the woman herself was helpless because her captor's was the strongest body. Again came to Luke the frightful sense of Power, again the dizzy knowledge that he could do whatever he chose.
At that instant the madness fell from him.
A physical motive there of course was, since the more intense the passion the briefer is its duration; but even if it originated in the physical, this reaction transcended things material and wheeled about to crush them. It was the second and fuller phase of that revelation which had come to him in the Sunday quiet of the Brooklyn streets. Burning, blinding, transfiguring, the Marvel and the Miracle, elemental and tremendous, returned, and what they had once done from the flesh to the spirit, they now did from the spirit to the flesh. They returned to remain. They completed the revolution, the new birth.