"Go, Juan," hissed Mrs. Sin. "I say--go!"
Her voice changed eerily to a deep, mocking bass; and Rita Irvin
lying, a pallid wraith of her once lovely self, upon the untidy bed,
stirred slightly--her lashes quivering. Her eyes opened and stared
straightly upward at the low, dirty ceiling, horror growing in their
shadowy depths.
CHAPTER XXXV
BEYOND THE VEIL
Rita Irvin's awakening was no awakening in the usually accepted sense
of the word; it did not even represent a lifting of the veil which cut
her off from the world, but no more than a momentary perception of the
existence of such a veil and of the existence of something behind it.
Upon the veil, in grey smoke, the name "Kazmah" was written in moving
characters. Beyond the veil, dimly divined, was life.
As of old the victims of the Inquisition, waking or dreaming, beheld
ever before them the instrument of their torture, so before this
woman's racked and half-numbed mind panoramically passed, an endless
pageant, the incidents of the night which had cut her off from living
men and women. She tottered on the border-line which divides sanity
from madness. She was learning what Sir Lucien had meant when, once,
long long ago, in some remote time when she was young and happy and
had belonged to a living world, he had said "a day is sure to come.
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