Its destruction was absolute--fiendish, it seemed to
Kendal.
He dropped into a chair and stared with his knee locked
in his hands.
"Damnation!" he repeated, with a white face. "I'll never
approach it again;" and then he added grimly, still
speaking aloud, "Janet will say I deserved it."
He had not an instant's doubt of the author of the
destruction, and he remembered with a flash in connection
with it the little silver-handled Algerian dagger that
pinned one of Nadie Palicsky's studies against the wall
of Elfrida's room. It was not till a quarter of an hour
afterward that he thought it worth while to pick up the
note that lay on the table addressed to him, and then he
opened it with a nauseated sense of her unnecessary
insistence.
"I have come here this morning," Elfrida had written,
"determined to either kill myself or IT. It is impossible,
I find, notwithstanding all that I said, that both should
continue to exist. I cannot explain further, you must
not ask it of me. You may not believe me when I tell you
that I struggled hard to let it be myself. I had such a
hideous doubt as to which had the best right to live.
But I failed there--death is too ghastly. So I did what
you see.
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