Quicker than she, he caught and tossed her spinning on the sofa. Then, running to the open window, he shouted from it:
“Emmanuel! The dogs!”
Leilah, falling backward on the lounge, was too stunned to hear. But she steadied herself, recovered, got to her feet and making again for the stair, called at Barouffski:
“Free me from you and you shall have half of what I have.”
“Half!” he repeated. At once he was upon her. “All,” he cried. “I want it all, all of yours and all of his.”
As he spoke he struck her, shoved her aside, raised the tapestry and vanished. For a second she heard him hastening down, while at once from without came the barking of dogs, the jar of oaths, the sound of cries.
What it meant she did not know. Her head was whirling. The fall, the blow, the indignity of both clouded and confused her. From without the uproar mounted and suddenly, the uproar prompting, into the turmoil that was her mind, a gleam of understanding shot. At the apperception of it she shrieked, ran to the window where she shrieked again. The loosened dogs had sprung at Verplank, who, overwhelmed had fallen.
Again she shrieked. Answering the shriek, mingling with it, were snarls, the gnashing of fangs, the din of great hounds ferociously struggling for blood, tearing vehemently at flesh, at a flesh, though, that rebelled.
Verplank rose up between them. With a kick he sent one of them sprawling. But, in the recoil, torn at by the other hound, he stumbled. The dog was at his throat. In protection he held his left arm against it. With his right hand he got at the revolver in his pocket, and, through the pocket, fired twice into the brute. Gnashing still, it rolled away.
But now, from the other side, the second hound was on him. He saw its eyes, felt its breath, felt its fangs. Again he fired. As he did so, his hand relaxed. He heard a woman shrieking, the sound of hurrying feet. The wall before him mounted. His senses scattered into night.
Suddenly the garden was filled with people. Through the gate, two sergents de ville had come. These, forms furtive and uncertain followed. From the house, led by Barouffski, the footmen ran. Above, from the window, still there issued a woman’s shrieks.
Barouffski stopped, and turned. He looked up at the window. He smiled. With one hand he tapped his breast, with the other he pointed at Verplank. Then, in French, reassuringly, he called:
“My dear! See! You may be tranquil. I, I am unharmed. It is the robber.”
At the ignominy of that flouting jeer, Leilah, impelled by the impulse to do something, though it were but to beat her head against a wall, rushed from the window, and, strangling with spasms, fled out of the room and down the stair, where horror so suffocatingly enveloped her that in it her brain tipped, and she fell.
XI
In the golden half light of the Opéra, a chorus, soprano voices on one side of the stage alternating with contralto on the other, vaporised the subtle sensuality of the scene.
Violet Silverstairs, turning to her husband, who was seated behind her, remarked:
“How much better the Italian school is than the French.”
Silverstairs, ignorant of either, and indifferent to both, promenaded his glass about the house.
“I wonder why Tempest doesn’t show up? There is Marie de Fresnoy! I saw de Fresnoy today for the first time since his duel with Barouffski. What a ridiculous affair that was! I suppose one of these days he will have another with d’Arcy.”
Violet turned to him again.
“Because of Marie? How absurd you are! D’Arcy doesn’t interest her. No man could unless he drove at her with a four-in-hand, and d’Arcy has nothing.”
Silverstairs, still promenading his glass, exclaimed:
“There he is now!”
“Who? D’Arcy?”
“Yes, with the Helley-Quetgens, in that box between the columns. Isn’t that your friend Leilah whom he is talking to? By Jove, it is, and Barouffski is there, also.”
Violet, who had also been promenading her glass, put it down.
“Well, he ought to be. I do think she has acted scandalously. What is said at the club?”
“About Verplank? It is forgotten already. Barouffski, you know, claimed that it was a mistake, and as it appears that Verplank agreed with him, as from neither the one nor the other any charge was forthcoming, the police could do nothing but get Verplank back to the Ritz.”
Impatiently Violet unfurled her fan.
“Yes, where she has been every day; every day, that is, when she has not been with d’Arcy.”
The statement was inexact. Leilah had indeed been at the Ritz but d’Arcy she had seen but once, momentarily, by accident—if there be such a thing, in any event through one of those seeming hazards which, however fortuitous at first, afterward appear to have been designed. It was a little, though, before Leilah took that view of things. Meanwhile, when, on recovering from her swoon, she learned that Verplank had also recovered she realised with thanksgiving that Destiny which has its tyrannies has its mercies as well. So soon then as she could get from the bed into which the horrors of the midspring nightmare had thrown her, she went to the Ritz where she found Verplank amply attended, abundantly bandaged, severely but not dangerously hurt.
“One of the brutes nearly chewed my arm off,” he told her. “If the other omitted to eat me entirely, it was not because he did not try. I did for them, though,” he added, and smiled as he said it. After the manner of man, he took comfort in the feat.
“But not for the worst brute,” Leilah answered wishing in spite of herself, wishing instinctively and even ungrammatically that some good fate might.
From beneath a bandage, Verplank laughed:
“Bah! I’ll do for
