The contour of her cheeks was soft and round. But one can imagine,
in happier days, that there was a captivating play of expression, an
esprit, a beauté de diable, that would be particularly fascinating
to a man like old "Mike" McDonald. And upon such a woman would the
self-made man, the gambler, uncultivated and rough, fast approaching
old age, delight to heap luxury and adoration, as there is no doubt
"Mike" McDonald did.
And is it not easy to imagine that such a woman would have a powerful
attraction for a young man, with her sophistication and experience
matched against his ignorance? And now one of the men is dead of a
broken heart, and the other struck down in the very first flush of his
youth, and the instrument of pleasure and destruction stands at the
end of a shattered life.
Until a jury should decide, in so far as human fallibility may decide,
just whether or how Dora McDonald shot down Webster Guerin, that
victim of tangled love and jealousy, a waiting city hung expectant on
every incident bared since the day that the artist toppled before a
pistol ball in his studio with a woman of furs and furbelows standing
sobbing above him.