The Everlasting Whisper

She had known fear, blind, paralysing terror. She had suffered indignity and experienced an insulted resentment that seared through her like a hot iron. She had known pain, merciless bodily pain. Now she was plunged into stupor. But that stupor was of only the fraction of a second in duration. A flash as of white fire flared through her brain. In a soul in torment something had happened. Something had been killed within her--or something had been born. A blow at a man's hand had seemed to cut through her being; it had separated body and spirit. She was conscious of the body as though she stood apart and looked down at it. He could beat that; he was stronger. The spirit rose above it--a spirit bathed in floods of fire. She was in the sudden fierce grip of such anger as kills, of such defiance as suffers death and does not yield.

"I won't go with you," she cried. "You may beat me; you may kill me if you like, unthinkable brute that you are. I will not follow you now; I will never follow one step ever. I have listened to you; now listen to me! I would rather die than be brought to safety by you. If I cannot find the way home without your help, I do not want ever to get home. I am not afraid of you or your rope. I had rather feel a clean rope across my shoulders until they were bloody than your vile hand on mine."

"You will do what I tell you to do," he said thickly. "It is the only way. I will make you."

Blazing eyes burning in a death-white face gave him his only answer. His own face now was no less white; iron-bodied as he was, he was trembling. Yet he lifted the rope. To strike the second blow. Not just to frighten her, but to strike. She read his purpose clearly, and she could not restrain a shudder of her flesh. But she did not draw back from him, and she did not cry out. She meant what she had said, or what some re-born Gloria had said for her; he might kill her, but she would not follow him.

And then Mark King, as he was about to strike, stayed his hand at the last moment and hurled the rope far from him, and whirled about and left her.