of her chamber and pursued her unfrocked, untoothed, unputtied, with a fluttering length of kimono in her palsied hand, driving her finally into the yard beneath the big cherry tree, which he circled, howling, making frantic lunges for her as she twittered with fear, casting splintered glances all over the listening neighborhood as she put on the crumpled wrapper, hid partially the indecent jigging of her breasts, and implored succor. It did not come.
“You bitch!” he screamed. “I’ll kill you. You have drunk my heart’s-blood, you have driven me to the brink of destruction, and you gloat upon my misery, listening with fiendish delight to my death-rattle, bloody and unnatural monster that you are.”
She kept the tree deftly between them and, when his attention was diverted for a moment to the flood of anathema, tore off on fear— quick feet, streetward to the haven of the Tarkintons’house. As she rested there, in Mrs. Tarkinton’s consolatory arms, weeping hysterically and dredging gullies in her poor painted face, they heard his chaotic footsteps blundering within his house, the heavy crash of furniture, and his fierce curses when he fell.
“He’ll kill himself! He’ll kill himself!” she cried. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Oh, my God!” she wept. “I’ve never been talked to that way by any man in my life!”
Gant fell heavily within his house. There was silence. She rose fearfully.
“He’s not a bad man,” she whispered.
One morning in early summer, after Helen had returned, Eugene was wakened by scuffling feet and excited cries along the small boardwalk that skirted the house on its upper side and led to the playhouse, a musty little structure of pine with a single big room, which he could almost touch from the sloping roof that flowed about his gabled backroom window. The playhouse was another of the strange extravagancies of Gantian fancy: it had been built for the children when they were young. It had been for many years closed, it was a retreat of delight; its imprisoned air, stale and cool, was scented permanently with old pine boards, cased books, and dusty magazines.
For some weeks now it had been occupied by Mrs. Selborne’s South
