The first dim noises of the tragedy in the living-room Mary\'s stupefied senses had confused with a nightmare which she had been painfully fighting.

The torch in Nance\'s hand had flashed through a crack into her face once. It was the flame of a revolver in the hands of a thief in Jim\'s den in New York. She merely felt it. Her eyes had been gouged out and she was blind. A gang of his coarse companions were holding a council, cursing, drinking, fighting. Jim had sprung between two snarling brutes and knocked the revolver into the air. The flame had scorched her face.

With an oath he had slapped her.

“Get out, you damned little fool!” he growled. “You\'re always in the way when you\'re not wanted. Nobody can ever find you when there\'s work to be done——”

“But I can\'t see, Jim dear,” she pleaded. “I do not know when things are out of place——”

“You\'re a liar!” he roared. “You know where every piece of junk stands in this room better than I do. I can\'t bring a friend into that door that you don\'t know it. You can hear the swish of a woman\'s skirt on the stairs four stories below——”

“I only asked you who the woman was who came in with you, Jim——”

His fingers gripped her throat and stopped her breath. Through the roar of surging blood she could barely hear the vile words he was dinning into her ears.

“I know you just asked me, you nosing little devil, and it\'s none of your business! She\'s a pal of mine, if you want to know, the slickest thief that ever robbed a flat. She\'s got more sense in a minute than you\'ll ever have in a lifetime. She\'s going to live here with me now. You can sleep on the cot in the kitchen. And you come when she calls, if you know what\'s good for your lazy hide. I\'ve told her to thrash the life out of you if you dare to give her any impudence.”

She had cowered at his feet and begged him not to beat her again. The fumes of whiskey and stale beer filled the place.

Jim turned from her to quell a new fight at the other end of the room. Another woman was there, coarse, dirty, beastly. She drew a knife and demanded her share of the night\'s robberies. She was trying to break from the men who held her to stab Jim. They were all fighting and smashing the furniture——

She sprang from the bed with a cry of horror. The noise was real! It was not a dream. The beast inside was stumbling in the dark. His passions fired by liquor, he was fumbling to find his way into her room.

She rushed to the door and put her shoulder against the bar, panting in terror.

She heard his strangling cry:

“Here! Here! Great God! Do you know what you\'re doing?”

And then his mother\'s voice, mad with greed, cruel, merciless:

“I just want yer money—that\'s all, an\' I\'m goin\' to have it!”

She heard the clinch in the struggle and the dull blow of the knife. In a sudden flash she saw it all. He had succeeded in rousing Nance\'s avarice and transforming her into a fiend. Without knowing it she was stabbing her own son to death in the room in which he had been born!

She tried to scream and her lips refused to move. She tried to hurry to the rescue and her knees turned to water.

Gasping for breath, she drew the bar from her prison door and walked slowly into the room.

Nance\'s tall, bony figure was still crouched over the open bag, her left hand buried in the gold, her right gripping the knife, her face convulsed with greed—avarice and murder blended into perfect hell-lit unity at last.

Jim lay on his back, limp and still, obliquely across the couch, his breast bared in the struggle, the blood oozing a widening scarlet blot on his white shirt. His head had fallen backward over the edge and could not be seen.

Without moving a muscle, her body crouching, Nance spoke:

“You wuz awake—you heered?”

“Yes!”

The gleaming eyes burned through the gray dawn, two points of scintillating, hellish light fixed in purpose on the intruder.

She had only meant to take the money. The fool had fought. She killed him because she had to. And now the sobbing, sniveling little idiot who had kept her waiting all night had stuck her nose into some thing that didn\'t concern her. If she opened her mouth, the gallows would be the end.

She would open it too. Of course she would. Sh............