She pronounced it with a slight trilling of the R, and if it was left in her of half a hundred loves to stir on this swift descent of her life line, she did over Jason. Partly because he was his winged-Hermes self, and partly because—because—it was difficult for her rather fagged brain to rummage back.

Thus the rest may be told:

Entering her rooms one morning, a pair of furiously garish ones over a musical-instrument store on the Bowery, he threw himself full length on the red-cotton divan, arms locked under his always angry-looking head, and watching her, through low lids, trail about the room at the business of preparing him a surlily demanded cup of coffee. Her none too immaculate pink robe trailed a cotton-lace tail irritatingly about her heels, which slip-slopped as she walked, her stockings, without benefit of support, twisting about her ankles.

She was barometer for his moods, which were elemental, and had learned to tremble with a queer exaltation of fear before them.

"My Red-boy blue to-day," she said, stooping as she passed and wanting to kiss him.

He let his lids drop and would have none of her. They were curiously blue, she thought, as if of unutterable fatigue, and then quickly appraised that his luck was still letting him in for the walloping now of two weeks' duration. His diamond-and-opal scarfpin was gone, and the gold cuff links replaced with mother-of-pearl.

She could be violently bitter about money, and when the flame of his personality was not there to be reckoned with, ten times a day she ejected him, with a venom that was a psychosis, out of her further toleration. Not so far gone was Winnie but that she could count on the twist of her body and the arch of her throat as revenue getters.

At first Jason had been lavish, almost with a smack of some of the old days she had known, spending with the easy prodigality of the gambler in luck. There was a near-seal coat from him in her cupboard of near-silks, and the flimsy wooden walls of her rooms had been freshly papered in roses.

Then his luck had turned, and to top his sparseness with her this new sullenness which she feared and yet which could be so delicious to her—reminiscently delicious.

She gave him coffee, and he drank it like medicine out of a thick-lipped cup painted in roses.

"My Red-boy blue," she reiterated, trying to ingratiate her arms about his neck. "Red-boy tells Winnie he won't be back for two whole days and then brings her surprise party very next day. Red-boy can't stay away from Winnie."

"Let go."

"Red-boy bring Winnie nothing? Not little weeny, weeny nothing?" drawing a design down his coat sleeve, her mouth bunched.

Suddenly he jerked her so that the breath jumped in a warm fan of it against her face.

"You're the only thing I've got in the world, Win. My luck's gone, but I've got you. Tell me I've got you."

He could be equally intense over which street car to take, and she knew it, but somehow it lessened for her none of the lure of his nervosity, and with her mind recoiling from his pennilessness her body inclined.

"Tell me, Winnie, that I have you."

"You know you have," she said, and smiled, with her head back so that her face foreshortened.

"I'm going far for you Winnie. Gambling is too rotten—and too easy. I want to build bridges for you. Practice law. Corner Wall Street."

This last clicked.

"Once," she said, lying back, with her pupils enlarging with the fleeting memories she was not always alert enough to clutch—"once—once when I lived around Central Park—a friend of mine—vice-president he was—Well, never mind, he was my friend—it was nothing for him to turn over a thousand or two a week for me in Wall Street."

This exaggeration was gross, but it could feed the flame of his passion for her like oil.

"I'll work us up and out of this! I've got better stuff in me. I want to wind you in pearls—diamonds—sapphires."

"I had a five-thousand-dollar string once—of star sapphires."

"Trust me, Winnie. Help me by having confidence in me. I'm glad my luck is welching. It will be lean at first, until I get on my legs. But it's not too late yet. Win, if only I have some one to stand by me. To believe—to fight with and for me! Get me, girl? Believe in me."

"Sure. Always play strong with the cops, Red. It's the short cut to ready money. Ready money, Red. That's what gets you there. Don't ask any girl to hang on if it's shy. That's where I spun myself dirt many a time, hanging on after it got shy. Ugh! That's what did for me—hanging on—after it got shy."

"No. No. You don't understand. For God's sake try to get me, Winnie. Fight up with me. It'll be lean, starting, but I'll finish strong for you."

"Don't lean on me. I'm no wailing wall. What's it to me all your highfaluting talk. You've been as slab-sided in the pockets as a cat all month. Don't have to stand it. I've got friends—spenders—"

There had been atrocious scenes, based on his jealousies of her, which some imp in her would lead her to provoke, notwithstanding that even as she spoke she regretted, and reached back for the words,

"I mean—"

"I know what you mean," he said, quietly, permitting her to lie back against him and baring his teeth down at her.

She actually thought he was smiling.

"I'm not a dead one by a long shot," she said, kindling with what was probably her desire to excite him.

"No?"

"No. I can still have the best. The very best. If you want to know it, a political Indian with a car as long as this room, not mentioning any names, is after me—"

She still harbored the unfortunate delusion that he was smiling.

"You thought I was up at Ossining this morning, didn't you?" he asked, lazily for him. He went there occasionally to visit a friend in the state prison who had once served him well in a gambling raid and was now doing a short larceny term there.

"You said you were—"

"I said I was. Yes. But I came back unexpectedly, didn't I?"

"Y-yes, Red?"

"Look at me!"

She raised round and ready-to-be-terrified eyes.

"Murphy was here last night!" he cracked at her, bang-bang-bang-bang-bang, like so many pistol shots.

"Why, Red—I—You—"

"Don't lie. Murphy was here last night! I saw him leave this morning as I came in."

It was hazard, pure and simple. Not even a wild one, because all too easily he could kiss down what would be sure to be only her half-flattered resentment.

But there was a cigar stub on the table edge, and certain of her adjustments of the room when he entered had been rather quick. He could be like that with her, crazily the slave of who knows what beauty he found in her; jealous of even an unaccountable inflection in her voice. There had been unmentionable frenzies of elemental anger between them and she feared and exulted in these strange poles of his nature.

"Murphy was here last night!"

It had happened, in spite of a caution worthy of a finer finesse than hers, and suddenly she seemed to realize the quality of her fear for him to whom she was everything and who to her was not all.

"Don't, Red," she said, all the bars of her pretense down and dodging from his eyes rather than from any move he made toward her. "Don't, Red. Don't!" And began to whimper in the unbeautifulness of fear, becoming strangely smaller as her pallor mounted.

He was as terrible and as swarthy and as melodramatic as Othello.

"Don't, Red," she called still again, and it was as if her voice came to him from across a bog.

He was standing with one knee dug into the couch, straining her head back against the wall, his hand on her forehead and the beautiful flexing arch of her neck rising ... swanlike.

"Watch out!" There was a raw nail in the wall where a picture had hung. Murphy had kept knocking it awry and she had removed it. "Watch out, Red! No-o—no—"

Through the star-spangled red he glimpsed her once where the hair swept off her brow, and for the moment, to his blurred craziness, it was as if through the red her brow was shotted with little scars and pock marks from glass, and a hot surge of unaccountable sickness fanned the enormous silence of his rage.

With or without his knowing it, that raw nail drove slowly home to the rear of Winnie's left ear, upward toward the cerebellum as he tilted and tilted, and the convex curve of her neck mounted like a bow stretched outward.

* * * * *

There was little about Jason's trial to entitle it to more than a back-page paragraph in the dailies. He sat through those days, that were crisscrossed with prison bars, much like those drowned figures encountered by deep-sea divers, which, seated upright in death, are pressed down by the waters of unreality.

It is doubtful if he spoke a hundred words during the lean, celled weeks of his waiting, and then with a vacuous sort of apathy and solely upon advice of counsel. Even when he took the stand, undramatically, his voice, without even a plating of zest for life, was like some old drum with the parchment too tired to vibrate.

Women, however, cried over him and the storm in his eyes and the curiously downy back of his neck where the last of his youth still marked him.

To Sara, from her place in the first row, on those not infrequent occasions when his eyes fumbled for hers, he seemed to drown in her gaze—back—somewhere—

On a Friday at high noon the jury adjourned, the judge charging it with a solemnity that rang up to wise old rafters and down into one woman's thirsty soul like life-giving waters.

In part he told the twelve men about to file out, "If there has been anything in my attitude during the recital of the defendant's story, which has appeared to you to be in the slightest manner prejudiced one way or another, I charge you to strike such mistaken impressions from your minds.

"I have tried honestly to wash the slate of my mind clean to take down faithfully the aspects of this case which for two weeks has occupied this jury.

"If you believe the defendant guilty of the heinous crime in question, do not falter in your use of the power with which the law has vested you.

"If, on the other hand and to the best of your judgment, there has been in the defendant's life extenuating circumstances, er—a limitation of environment, home influence, close not the avenues of your fair judgment.

"Did this man in the kind of er—a—frenzy he describes and to which witnesses agree he was subject, deliberately strain back the Ross woman's head until the nail penetrated?

"If so, remember the law takes knowledge only of self-defense.

"On the other hand, ask of yourselves well, did the defendant, in the frenzy which he claims had hold of him when he committed this unusual crime, know that the nail was there?

"Would Winnie Ross have met her death if the nail had not been there?

"Gentlemen, in the name of the law, solemnly and with a fear of God in your hearts, I charge you."

It was a quick verdict. Three hours and forty minutes.

"Not guilty."

In the front row there, with the titillating folderols on her bonnet and her hand at her throat as if she would tear it open for the mystery of the pain of the heartbeat in it, Sara Turkletaub heard, and, hearing, swooned into the pit of her pain and her joy.

Her son, with brackets of fatigue out about his mouth, was standing over her when she opened her eyes, the look of crucifixion close to the front of them.

"Mother," he said, pressing her head close to his robes of state and holding a throat-straining quiver under his voice, "I—I shouldn't have let you stay. It was too—much for you."

It took her a moment for the mist to clear.

"I—Son—did somebody strike? Hit? Strange. I—I must have been hurt. Son, am I bleeding?" And looked down, clasping her hand to the bosom of her decent black-silk basque.

"Son, I—It was a good verdict, not? I—couldn't have stood it—if—if it wasn't. I—Something—It was good, not?"

"Yes, mother, yes."

"Don't—don't let that boy get away, son. I think—those tempers—I can help—him. You see, I know—how to handle—Somehow I—"

"Yes, mother, only now you must sit quietly—"

"Promise me, son, you won't let him get away without I see him?"

"Yes, dear, only please now—a moment—quiet—"

You see, the judge was very tired, and, looking down at the spot where her hand still lay at her bosom as if to press down a hurt, the red of her same obsession shook and shook him.

Somehow it seemed to him, too, that her dear heart was bleeding.

THE END