"Stop!" It was a new voice that spoke now: the blow that had struck her face had suddenly transformed her into a desperate woman.
Challoner stopped; for he saw the weapon trained upon him. Again, without affecting her aim, she tapped it.
"Listen to me!" she cried, her voice growing hoarser as she went on, "this thing has been responsible for one murder, and now, Lawrence Challoner, I'm going to kill you with it. It's the last straw that breaks the camel's back. I hate you! I despise you!" she raged. "I loved you once, I have always loved you until now; you loved me once, too, I know—though other people thought that you had married me for my money. But I knew different—you couldn't fool me about that! And it was because of that love that I have lived for you and nothing else. You have been everything in the world to me—my god, almost. But it is all over now! I'm through with you, and I'm going to have you thrown like some soiled rag into the gutters of humanity—where you belong!"
She paused for breath, but not once did her weapon falter.
"There are two things," she resumed, "that stand out in my memory just now. The first is the night when you did not come home! Do you remember that night?—No—there were too many of them later on! But I have never forgotten that night I spent in the torture chamber! It was a white night for me."
Again she paused, and her voice deepened as she said:—
"Lawrence Challoner, the time will come when you will wail and whine and wonder why I don't come to you—why it is not my footsteps that you hear! But you will wait for me through a long, long night, and I shall never come....
"Oh, it does me good when I recall the day that Prosecutor Murgatroyd told those twelve men the kind of a man you were," she declared scornfully. "It does me good, too, to recall how you writhed under the lash and quivered when he cut you to the quick. But now I'm going to do more to you than you ever did to me—more than Murgatroyd did to you...."
She stopped, and then went on mercilessly:—
"I'm going to tear your soul out—yes, you've got a soul, or I would never have gone down into the depths with you! But now I'm through serving you without receiving so much as a smile," she continued fiercely, her body swaying, but her aim still true. "I don't ask for my rights or my just dues; a smile and a kind word now and then is all I ask. My pride is not all gone; I'd like to be proud of you just once. I lie about you to my friends—to my dearest friends—and you convict me with the miserable truth! I clung to you through all your vices, I clung to you even when you killed, I clung to you because I knew that somewhere within you there was something that clamoured for me, that clung to my affection. But feeble as it was, it is dead now. And you are the shell, the ugly hulk, a thing without the soul that I cared for! But I'm through with you—I'm going to kill you—don't you move—I'm through with you—through—" The next moment she dropped the weapon, and it fell clattering to the floor.