she afterwards found, she cut the skin of her own hands with her own
nails. Had the man's hair been less thick or strong, or her own
tenacity less steadfast, he would have murdered her before any
interruption could have saved her.

And yet he had not purposed to murder her, or even, in the first
instance, to inflict on her any bodily harm. But he had been
determined to get money. With such a sum of money as he had named,
it might, he thought, be possible for him to win his way across to
America. He might bribe men to hide him in the hold of a ship, and
thus there might be for him, at any rate, a possibility of escape.
That there must be money in the house he had still thought when
first he laid hands on the poor woman; and then, when the struggle
had once begun, when he had felt her muscles contending with his,
the passion of the beast was aroused within him, and he strove
against her as he would have striven against a dog. But yet, when
the knife was in his hand, he had not driven it against her heart.

Then suddenly, while they were yet rolling on the floor, there was a
sound of footsteps in the passage. Aaron Trow instantly leaped to
his feet, leaving his victim on the ground, with huge lumps of his
thick clotted hair in her hand. Thus, and thus only, could he have
liberated himself from her grasp. He rushed at the door, and there
he came against the two negro servant-girls who had returned down to
their kitchen from the road on which they had been straying. Trow,
as he half saw them in the dark, not knowing how many there might
be, or whether there was a man among them, rushed through them,
upsetting one scared girl in his passage. With the instinct and
with the timidity of a beast, his impulse now was to escape, and he
hurried away back to the road and to his lair, leaving the three