The Golden Woman

But the man before her had suddenly changed while she was speaking. The softness had left his eyes. They had suddenly become hot, and bloodshot, and hard. His breath came quickly, heavily, his thin nostrils dilating with the furious emotion that swept through his body. Ike had kissed her. He had forgotten all her sufferings in his own sudden, jealous fury.

Joan waited. The change in the man had passed unobserved by her. Then, as no answer was forthcoming, she went on-"Wherever I go it is the same. Death and disaster. Oh, it is awful! Sometimes I think I shall go mad. Is there no corner of the earth where I can hide myself from the shadow of this haunting curse?"

"Ike kissed you?"

Buck's voice grated harshly. Somehow her appeal had passed him by. All his better thoughts and feelings were overshadowed for the moment. A fierce madness was sweeping through his veins, his heart, his brain, a madness of feeling such as he had never before experienced.

The girl answered him, still without recognizing the change.

"Yes," she said in a dull, hopeless way. "And the inevitable happened. It followed swiftly, surely, as it always seems to follow. He is dead."

"He got it--as he should get it. He got no more than he'd have got if I'd been around."

Buck's mood could no longer escape her. She looked into the hard, young face, startled. She saw the fury in his eyes, the clenched jaws, with their muscles outstanding with the force of the fury stirring him.

The sight agitated her, but somehow it did not frighten. She half understood. At least she thought she did. She read his resentment as that of a man who sees in the outrage a breaking of all the laws of chivalry. She missed the real note underlying it.

"What does his act matter?" she said almost indifferently, her mind on what she regarded as the real tragedy. "He was drunk. He was not responsible. No, no. It is not that which matters. It was the other. He left me--to go to his death. Had Pete not been waiting for him it would have been just the same. Disaster! Death! Oh! can you not see? It is the disaster which always follows me."

Her protest was not without its effect. So insistent was she on the resulting tragedy that Buck found himself endeavoring to follow her thought in spite of his own feelings. She was associating this tragedy with herself--as part of her life, her fate.

But it was some moments before the man was sufficiently master of himself--before he could detach his thought altogether from the human feelings stirring him. The words sang on his ear-drums. "He--he kissed me." They were flaming through his brain. They blurred every other thought, and, for a time, left him incapable of lending her that support he would so willingly give her. Finally, however, his better nature had its way. He choked down his jealous fury, and strove to find means of comforting her.