Over night she changed from a gentle-hearted girl into a woman whose breast flamed with a lust for vengeance against a class from which death alone could free her lover.

She threw herself, heart and soul, into the deliberations and transactions of the great red circle: her father understood and yet was amazed.
Then he was put to death by the class she had come to hate.

One more stone in the sepulchre of her tender, girlish ideals.

When the time came she travelled to Graustark in response to the call of the Committee of Ten; she came prepared to kill the creature she would be asked to kill.
And yet down in her heart she was sore afraid.
She was there, not to kill a man grown old in wrongs to her people, but to destroy the life of a gentle, innocent boy of seven! There were times when her heart shrank from the unholy deed she had been selected to perform; she even prayed that death might come to her before the hour in which she was to do this execrable thing in behalf of the humanity she served.

But there was never a thought of receding from the bloody task set down for her--a task so morbid, so horrid that even the most vicious of men gloated in the satisfaction that they had not been chosen in her place.