Even in
his transport of rage, with his fingers dug into her flesh, he stopped
to see if this were true.
It wasn't. She swayed uncertainly, dazed and gasping, while her hair,
shaken loose from its knot, slowly cascaded over one shoulder. Then
stumbling, groping, with a hand on a chair, against the frame of the
door, she went out of the room.
* * * * *
Lee's jaw bled thickly and persistently; the blood soaked, filled, his
handkerchief; and, going to the drawer in the dining-room where the
linen was kept, he secured and held against a ragged wound a napkin, He
was nauseated and faint. His rage, killed, as it were, at its height,
left him with a sensation of emptiness and degradation. The silence--
after the last audible dragging footfall of Fanny slowly mounting the
stairs--was appalling: it was as though all the noise of all the world,
concentrated in his head, had been stopped at once and forever. He
removed the sop from the cut, and the bleeding promptly took up its
spreading over his throat and under his collar. That blow had killed a
great deal: the Lee Randon married to Fanny was already dead; Fanny,
too, had told him that she was dying, killed from within. It was a
shame.
He was walking when it occurred to him that he had better keep quiet;
if the blood didn't soon stop he should require help; he was noticeably
weak.
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