For there were strange shadows gathering on his convulsed face.
She turned as if to flee. Her husband was too quick for her.
With a single bound he reached the door and locked it.
“Margaret!” he wildly cried, as he crushed her to his breast, “the past is dead. Its record lies there, ashes to ashes—the ashes of a dead life!
“Let me live! Let us go on to the end together.
“No one would know. If we were married now, in due form, the silence of the past would be unbroken. It is my last prayer. Forgive!”
The frightened woman was struggling in his relentless grasp, as he pleaded “for the child’s sake!”
She made one last despairing effort to break his frenzied hold upon her, but she stood there helpless and transfixed in horror, as his arms relaxed and he suddenly sank at her feet, lying there prone upon the tapestried floor. The Dark Angel’s wings had touched his pallid brow.
The shriek of horror was frozen on her lips by a sudden fear, and then grasping at her draperies, she fled away through the open door of the next apartment. She dared not glance behind her, for death was there!
Now, between her and that locked door lay the nameless thing which was but now a strong man, the peer of kings! The despairing lover who had died with the last frenzied words of reawakened tenderness upon his lips! The husband of her youth!