Woman's love could turn to hate, but not the love of Ellen Jorth.

He could drag her by the hair in the dust, beat her, and make her a thing to loathe, and cut her mortally in his savage and implacable thirst for revenge--but with her last gasp she would whisper she loved him and that she had lied to him to kill his faith.

It was that--his strange faith in her purity--which had won her love.

Of all men, that he should be the one to recognize the truth of her, the womanhood yet unsullied--how strange, how terrible, how overpowering! False, indeed, was she to the Jorths! False as her mother had been to an Isbel! This agony and destruction of her soul was the bitter Dead Sea fruit--the sins of her parents visited upon her.
"I'll end it all," she whispered to the night shadows that hovered over her.

No coward was she--no fear of pain or mangled flesh or death or the mysterious hereafter could ever stay her.