It was an intensely hot September night.  Magdalena, knowing that sleep was impossible, had not gone to bed.  She wandered restlessly about her large room, striving to force a current of air.  Not a vibration came through the open windows, nor a sound.  The very trees seemed to lean forward with limp hanging arms.  Across the stars was a dark veil, riven at long intervals with the copper of sheet lightning.  Her room, too, was dark.  A light would bring a pest of mosquitoes.  The high remote falsetto of several, as it was, proclaimed an impatient waiting for their ally, sleep.

Last night, Tiny had given a party, and wrung from Magdalena a promise that she would go to it.  Rose had called for her.  At the last moment Magdalena’s courage had shrunk to a final shuddering heap, and as she heard the wheels of the Geary waggonette, she had run upstairs, and flung herself between the bedclothes, sending down word that she had a raging toothache.  It was her first lie in many years, but it was better than to dance with despair and agony written on her relaxed face behind the windows of the garden in which Trennahan had asked her to marry him.

To-night she was seriously considering the proposition of going to her aunt in Santa Barbara, with or without her father’s consent.  Her sense of duty had not tumbled into the ruins of her will, but she argued that in this most crucial period of her life, her duty was to herself.  Helena had not even asked her to be bridesmaid; she took her acquiescence for granted.  Magdalena laughed aloud at the thought; but she could not leave Helena in the lurch at the last moment.  When she got to Santa Barbara, she could plead her aunt’s ill health as excuse for not returning in time for the ceremony.  She was in a mood to tell twenty lies if necessary, but she would not stand at the altar with Trennahan and Helena.  Her passionate desire for change of associations was rising rapidly to the dignity of a fixed idea.  To-morrow there must be a change of some sort, or her brain would be babbling its secrets.  Already her memory would not connect at times.  She felt sure that the prolonged strain had produced a certain congestion in her brain.  And she was beginning to wonder if she hated Helena.  The fires in Magdalena burned slowly, but they burned exceeding hot.

She paused and thrust her head forward.  For some seconds past her sub-consciousness had grasped the sound of galloping hoofs.  They were on the estate, by the deer park; a horse was galloping furiously toward the house.

She ran to the window and looked out.  She could see nothing.  Could it be a runaway horse?  Was somebody ill?  The flying feet turned abruptly and made for the rear of the house, then paused suddenly.  There was a furious knocking.

Magdalena’s knees shook with a swift presentiment.  Something had happened-was going to happen-to her.  She stood holding her breath.  Someone ran softly but swiftly up the stair, and down the hall, to her room.  She knew then who it was, and ran forward and opened the door.

“Helena!” she exclaimed.  “What is the matter?  Something has-Mr. Trennahan-”

Helena flung herself upon Magdalena and burst into a passion of weeping.  Magdalena stood rigid, ice in her veins.  “Is he dead?” she managed to ask.

“No!  He isn’t.  I wish he were-No, I don’t mean that-I’ll tell you in a minute-Let me get through first!”

Magdalena dragged her shaking limbs across the room and felt for a chair.  Helena began pacing rapidly up and down, pushing the chairs out of her way.

“Would you like a light?” asked Magdalena.

“No, thanks; I don’t want to be eaten alive with mosquitoes.  Oh, how shall I begin?  I suppose you think we’ve had a commonplace quarrel.  I wish we had.  I swear to you, ’Lena, that up to to-night I loved him-yes, I know that I did!  I was rather sorry I’d promised to marry so soon, for I like being a girl, not really belonging to anyone but myself, and I love being a great belle, and I think that I should have begged for another year-but I loved him better than anyone, and I really intended to marry him-”

“Aren’t you going to marry him?”

“Don’t be so stern, ’Lena!  You don’t know all yet.  Lately I’ve been alone with him a great deal, and you know how you talk about yourselves in those circumstances.  I had told him everything I had ever done and thought-most; had turned myself inside out.  Then I made him talk.  Up to a certain point he was fluent enough; then he shut up like a clam.  I never was very curious about men; but because he was all mine, or perhaps because I didn’t have anything else to think about, I made up my mind he should come to confession.  He fought me off, but you know I have a way of getting what I want-if I don’t there’s trouble; and to-night I pulled his past life out of him bit by bit.  ’Lena! he’s had liaisons with married women; he’s kept house with women; he’s seen the worst life of every city!  For a few years-he confessed it in so many words-he was one of the maddest men in Europe.  The actual things he told me only in part; but you know I have the instincts of the devil.  ’Lena, he’s a human slum, and I hate him!  I hate him!  I hate him!”

“But that all belongs to his past.  He loves you, and you can make him better-make him forget-”

“I don’t want to make any man better.  I love everything to be clean and new and bright,-not mildewed with a thousand vices that I would never even discuss.  Oh, he’s a brute to ask me to marry him.  I hate myself that I’ve been engaged to him!  I feel as if I’d tumbled off a pedestal!”

“Are you so much better and purer than I?  I knew much of this; but it did not horrify me.  I knew too, what you may not know, that he came here in a critical time in his-his-inner life, and I was glad to think that-California had helped him to become quite another man.”  Her voice was hoarse, almost inarticulate.

Helena flung herself at Magdalena’s feet.  She was trembling with excitement; but her feverish appeal for sympathy met with no response.

“That is another thing that nearly drove me wild,-that I had taken him away from you for nothing.  I know you don’t care now; but you did-perhaps you do now-sometimes I’ve suspected, only I wouldn’t face it-and to think that in my wretched selfishness I’ve separated you for ever!  For your pride wouldn’t let you take him back now, and he’s as wild about me as ever:  I never thought he could lose control over himself as he did when I told him what I thought of him and beat him on the shoulders with both my fists.  He turned as white as a corpse and shook like a leaf.  Then he braced up and told me I was a little wild cat, and that he should leave me and come back when I had come to my senses, that he had no intention of giving me up.  But he need not come back.  I’ll never lay eyes on him again.  While he was letting me get at those things, I felt as if my love for him burst into a thousand pieces, and that when they flew together again they made hate.  He told me he was used to girls of the world, who understood things; and that the girls of California were so crude they either knew all there was to know by experience, or else they were prudes-”

Helena paused abruptly and caught her breath.  She had felt Magdalena extend her arm and stealthily open a drawer in the bureau beside her chair.  There was nothing remarkable in the fact, for in that drawer Magdalena kept her handkerchiefs.  Nevertheless, Helena shook with the palsy of terror; the cold sweat burst from her body.  In the intense darkness she could see nothing, only a vague patch where the face of Magdalena was.  The silence was so strained that surely a shriek must come tearing across it.  The shriek came from her own throat.  She leaped to her feet like a panther, reached the door in a bound, fled down the hall and the stair, her eyes glancing wildly over her shoulder, and so out to her horse.  It is many years since that night, but there are silent moments when that ride through the woods flashes down her memory and chills her skin,-that mad flight from an unimaginable horror, through the black woods on a terrified horse, the shadow of her fear racing just behind with outstretched arms and clutching fingers.

Helena’s sudden flight left Magdalena staring through the dark at the Spanish dagger in her hand.  Her arm was raised, her wrist curved; the dagger pointed toward the space which Helena had filled a moment ago.

“I intended to kill her,” she said aloud.  “I intended to kill her.”

The mental admission of the design and its frustration were almost simultaneous.  Her brain was still in a hideous tumult.  Weakened by suffering, the shock of Helena’s fickleness and injustice, the sudden perception that her sacrifice had been useless, if not absurd, had disturbed her mental balance for a few seconds, and left her at the mercy of passions hitherto in-existent to her consciousness.  Her love for her old friend, long trembling in the balance, had flashed into hate.  Upon hate had followed the murderous impulse for vengeance; not for her own sake, but for that of the man whose weakness had ruined her life and his own.  In the very height of her sudden madness she was still capable of a curious misdirected feminine unselfishness.

When she came to herself, chagrin that she had failed to accomplish her purpose possessed her mind for the moment, although she had made no attempt to follow Helena, beyond springing to her feet.  Then her conscience asserted itself, and reminded her that she should be appalled, overcome with horror, at the awful possibilities of her nature.  The picture of Helena in the death struggle, bleeding and gasping, rose before her.  Her knees gave way with horror and fright, and she fell upon her chair, dropping the dagger from her wet fingers, staring at the grim spectre of her friend.  Then once more the sound of galloping hoofs came to her ears.  Both Helena and herself were safe.

In a few moments her thoughts grouped themselves into a regret deeper and bitterer still.  She was capable of the highest passion, and Circumstance had diverted it from its natural climax and impelled it toward murder.  She sat there and thought until morning on the part to which she had been born; the ego dully attempting to understand, to realise that its imperious demands receive little consideration from the great Law of Circumstance, and are usually ignored.