“My life is my own, to do with it as I please.  I do not please to obey your commands.”

Her tortured heart surged up in wild triumph as he turned; it sank sickly as he came back.  He had a piece of rope in his hand, the heavy half-inch rope which had served to tie a horse.

“You would tie me!” she gasped.  “Me!”

“No,” he said tersely.  “As though you were any other fractious animal refusing discipline when refusal means death, I am going to whip you!”

“God!” screamed Gloria.  “Oh, my God!”

For again he but said simply the thing which he meant to do.  And she knew.  Yet the consummation was monstrous, unthinkable.  She would not believe it; at the last minute his lifted arm would fail him; God Himself would wither it; undreamed rescuers would come; the earth would open ... something would save her from this humiliation which would kill her.

“While I count three,” said King.  And steadily, though there was a pallor on his own face, which should have told her the terrible relentlessness of his intention, he counted:  “One, two, three.”

She put her face into her hands and shivered, and felt the fear of one under the flashing guillotine.  She willed to move, to obey, at this tardy second, but something within her, stronger than herself, held her back. “I won’t!” she screamed.  The blow fell swiftly.  The rope cut through the air with vicious sibilance and fell across the stooped shoulders.  The pain was immediate, hot and searing, and Gloria shrieked—­once only—­and grew still.  She dropped her hands and looked at him, her face as white as a dead girl’s, her eyes as unfathomable as a maniac’s.  She who had never been whipped in all of her life, she whose soft white body had been held inviolate by idolizing parents, she who had come to hold her own person as sacred as that of a high princess—­to be beaten by a man!  To be lashed across her shoulders with a horse’s tie-rope.  She, Gloria Gaynor, to have her bedding ripped off her, to be commanded to do a man’s bidding—­and to be whipped!

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.