The old Colonel stooped further, brought his stabbing gaze nearer her.  There were heavy yellow pouches under his eyes; his lower lip, not hidden by the stained white mustaches, twitched spasmodically.

“God looked and repented him that he had made man.  I might wish that he’d made you a man—­for just five minutes.  But what do you imagine he thinks when he contemplates you and your work, my dear?  Eh?... little she-devil, pretty little hell-cat!...”

Cally smothered a little noise between a cry and a sob.  She started away, by sheer strength of horror; somehow got away from the terrible old face, ran up her own steps.  Glancing whitely over her shoulder from this secure coign, she saw that Jack Dalhousie’s father still stood unmoving on her sidewalk, staring and leaning on his cane....

She closed the door quickly, shutting out the sight.

     XXX

How it sounded like an Epitaph, but still she would not cry; how she thinks of the Beach again, and hugs a Hateful Word to her Bosom; and Hugo starts suddenly on a sort of Wedding-Trip.

In her own room Carlisle was seized with a wild desire to cry.  Her spirit, shocked past bearing, demanded this instant relief.  But she fought down the loosening impulses within her, knowing their worse than uselessness; she had shed her heart’s tears for this before now.  And her need now was for strength; strength to meet her mother when need be, against whom key nor bolt brought privacy:  strength, above all, to wipe out this mark set upon her forehead....

She resisted the impulse to fling herself face downward upon the bed, which would have been fatal; kept stoutly upon her feet.  And presently, summoning all her courage, she stood at the window and peeped, pale-faced, between the curtains.  All was well down there now.  The old avenger was gone.  There were only people passing serenely over the familiar sidewalk, and the sunlight dying where she had stood and learned just now that a lie has a long life.

Yes, the Colonel was gone:  and with him, so it seemed, all veils and draperies, all misty sublimations.  One doesn’t idealize one’s self too much, with curses ringing in one’s ears.

Cally leaned weakly against the wall, both gloved palms pressed into the cold smoothness of her cheeks.  Somewhere in the still house a door suddenly banged shut, and she just repressed a scream....

Old Colonel Dalhousie did not deal in moral subtleties, that was clear.  Regret, penitence, sufferings, tears, or dreamy aspiration:  he did not stay to split such hairs as these.  His eye was for the large, the stark effect.  And by the intense singleness of his vision, he had freighted his opinions with an extraordinary conviction.  He had shouted down, as from a high bench, the world’s judgment on the life of Cally Heth.

Twenty-four years and over she had lived in this town; and at the end to be called a she-devil and a hell-cat.