He took her hand quickly. He feared to hear the words that he knew she
was about to say.
"Yes," he nodded. "Yes--she killed him."
Mrs. Marteen sank slowly back upon her pillows and lay with closed eyes.
A heavy pulse beat in the arteries at her throat, and a scarlet spot
burned on either cheek.
"Nemesis," she murmured. "Nemesis." She lay still for a moment. "Thank
God!" she said at length, and let her hands fall relaxed upon the
counterpane. She seemed as if asleep but for the quick intake of her
breath.
Gard gazed upon her with infinite tenderness, yet with sudden bitter
consciousness of the isolation of each individual soul. She was remote,
withdrawn. Even his eager sympathy could not reach the depths of her
self-tortured heart. But now at last he knew her, a completed being. The
soul was there, palpitant, awake. The something he had so sorely missed
was the living and real presence of spirit. It came over him in a wave
of realization that he, too, had been unconscious of his own higher self
until his love had made him feel the need of it in her. They two, from
the depths of self-satisfied power, had gone blindly in their paths of
self-seeking--till each had awakened the other. A strange, retarded
spiritual birth.
He looked back over his long career of remorseless success with
something of the self-horror he had read in her eyes as he had placed
the incriminating papers in her frail hands. And as she had cast
contamination from her, so he promised himself he would thrust predatory
greed from his own life. They were both born anew. They would both be
true to their own souls.
* * * * *