There was a priestliness in RoBards’ soul, too; but he was not going to slay his wife to appease any cloudy deity. She was already a burnt offering alive and he was ordered to sacrifice her flesh to end its tyranny over her hopeless soul.
He was puzzled only about the means.
His brain ran along an array of weapons; knife, poison, pistol, throttling fingers. He read the list as if a hand held a scrolled catalogue before his eyes. He discarded each as it came. It was too brutal.
He stared at Patty, tossing there alone, and his heart sickened with love. Then he was more than ever afraid for her. For now she was in such an extreme of blind woe that she was snatching at her hair!
She had lost her last interest in beauty. She was tearing at her hair, crisscrossing it over her face, biting and gnawing at it, sawing it through her teeth.
He ran to her to rescue that final grace. He took her hands from it and smoothed it back from her brow. It was soft beyond belief beneath his palm. It was deep and dense and voluptuously velvety.
He knelt and, holding her hands tight, kissed her lips and her cheeks and kissed her eyelids, as if he were weighting them finally with pennies. And he groaned: “Good-by, honey!”
Her eyelids opened under the kisses he had left upon them. She gasped:
“Good-by? You’re not going to leave me? Don’t! ah, don’t!”
He shook his head and groaned: