The Argosy — page 215: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

200 The Sapphire Cross. Sneeringly reminded that she was without money, and that the greater part of her jewels were in his own strong-box, she pointed to the watch and rings upon the toilet table. Upon this Cioronski quietly gathered up the things and put them into his pocket. Beside herself, Wanda seized the loaded pistol and turned its muzzle to her temple. Her husband wrested it from her, and put that also into one of the side pockets of his coat. Up to this moment he appears to have been calm—maliciously so, in fact. But as the quarrel raged on, his poor, semi-distraught mind grew more excited. When at last he rushed down stairs and out into the stifling heat of the moonlit streets, his brain, he admitted, ‘‘ seemed on fire.” To the diseased suspiciousness of his mood, then, every smallest circumstance became fraught with a new significance. He saw Guido hurrying in the direction of the palazzo, and instantly con- ceived that his object was to visit Wanda. Sometime before, with a morbid cunning only half-conscient of its own motives, secretly he had had the lock of the lumber-room cleaned. He carried the key about with him, curiously exultant over the unsuspected power of entrance which it gave him. Following Guido at a cautious distance, he watched him enter ; then, going round to the back of the palazzo, he mounted the dark staircase, and introducing himself into the lumber-room, disposed himself to listen. ‘Twenty minutes elapsed, but no sound broke the stillness. Softly opening the bedroom door then, he put in his head. Wanda was lying on the sofa, where she had thrown herself sobbing like an angry child not an hour before. Her head, pillowed on her arm, rose above the back of the couch. From a bracket above the light of a shaded lamp fell full upon her. But for the moonlight the rest of the large room was in semi-darkness. Cioronski watched her for a little, and the hatred he had against her at times grew stronger in his heart. He fingered the loaded revolver in his pocket. One idea began to take possession of him with an awful fascination. ‘The intense stillness, the uncanny light of the huge old room increased his excitement. Doubtless his strange out- burst of murderous fury against Lucia the very next day was but the after-swell of the tempest that surged up in him now. All at once, with a terrible swiftness (as men have been known to throw them- selves from some giddy height), he drew the weapon from his pocket and cocked it. At the same instant he accidentally shook the door. Wanda, startled, sprang up; but before she could turn, the revolver had been fired, then thrown into the room, and Cioronski the next moment found himself once again on the stairs. His meeting there with Tito recalled him to a full sense of the danger of his position. From that instant all the cunning of madness came into play in him. He went back quickly to his home, and in the indescribable confusion and alarm which reigned there in the = a Eomichbooks. Go