Meanwhile, they forced the woman to imbibe with them.  Joe, in spite of his returning confidence, kept such close watch of her that she could not spill her glass into the bucket, except rarely.  Hilda hated alcohol and its effect; she was not accustomed to drinking.  As she felt her intoxication mounting she became fearful that the very medium upon which she had counted for success would prove to be her undoing.  Desperately she battled to retain her wits.  More than once, with a reckless defiance utterly foreign to her preconceived plans, she was upon the point of hurling the bubbling contents of her glass into the flushed faces about her and telling these men how completely she was shamming, but she managed to resist the temptation.  That she felt such an impulse at all made her fearful of committing some action equally rash, of dropping some word that would prove fatal.

It was a hideous ordeal.  She realized that already the cloak of decency, of respectability, which she had been at such pains to preserve during these difficult years, was gone, lost for good and all.  She had made herself a Lady Godiva; by this night of conspicuous revelry she had undone everything.  Not only had she condoned the sins and the shortcomings of her dissolute husband, but also she had put herself on a level with him and with the fallen women of the town—­his customary associates.  Courteau had done this to her.  It had been his proposal.  She could have throttled him where he sat.

The long night dragged on interminably.  Like leeches the two McCaskeys clung to their prodigal host, and not until the early hours of morning, when the Count had become sodden, sullen, stupefied, and when they were in a condition little better, did they permit him to leave them.  How Hilda got him home she scarcely knew, for she, too, had all but lost command of her senses.  There were moments when she fought unavailingly against a mental numbness, a stupor that rolled upward and suffused her like a cloud of noxious vapors, leaving her knees weak, her hands clumsy, her vision blurred; again waves of deathly illness surged over her.  Under and through it all, however, her subconscious will to conquer remained firm.  Over and over she told herself: 

“I’ll have the truth and then—­I’ll make him pay.”

Courteau followed his wife into her room, and there his maudlin manner changed.  He roused himself and smiled at her fatuously; into his eyes flamed a desire, into his cheeks came a deeper flush.  He pawed at her caressingly; he voiced thick, passionate protestations.  Hilda had expected nothing less; it was for this that she had bled her flesh and crucified her spirit these many hours.

“You’re—­wonderful woman,” the man mumbled as he swayed with her in his arms.  “Got all the old charm and more.  Game, too!” He laughed foolishly, then in drunken gravity asserted:  “Well, I’m the man, the stronger vessel.  To turn hate into love, that—­”