"Bough is the honest man?..."
"Just Bough.... 'Maybe, in my decent anger at her goings on,' he says, 'I went a bit too far. Well! I'm ready to make amends by making her my wife.'"
The lioness crouched and leapt.
"You are Bough! You are the evil man, the servant of Satan, who wrought abomination upon a helpless child!"
The onslaught came so suddenly that he was staggered. Then he swore.
"Not me, by G——!"
She pointed her long arm at him, and some strange force seemed to be wielded by that unweaponed woman-hand that struck him and pierced him through flesh, and bone and marrow....
"You are the man!" She stretched her arms to the wild, hurrying clouds that looked in upon her through the yawning rifts in the roof, and called upon her Maker for vengeance. "How long wilt Thou delay, O Lord, righteous in judgment? Fulfil Thy promise! Bind Thou Thy millstone about the neck of this wretch, hated and accursed of Thee, and let it drag him down to the uttermost depths of the Lake of Fire, where such as he shall wallow and howl throughout Eternity!—--"
She was infinitely more terrible than the lioness who has licked her murdered cubs. No Pythoness at the dizziest height of the sacred frenzy, no Demeter wrought to delirium by maternal bereavement, was ever imagined by poet or painter as half so grand, and terrible, and awe-inspiring, as this furious cursing nun.
"—Delay not Thou, O Lord!" she prayed....