I had kissed my cousin Helen, as much as I pleased, before you had ever touched her hand." The incandescent lights grew blood-red, leaping up and down, in wild, bewildering frolic.
Then they steadied suddenly.

Helen's calm, lovely figure, in a shaft of sunlight, reappeared in the empty chair.
Ronnie handed the Infant to her; rose, staggered across the intervening space, and struck Aubrey Treherne a violent blow on the mouth.
Aubrey gripped his arms, and for a moment the two men glared at one another.
Then Ronnie's knees gave way again; his feet sank deeply into the sand; and Aubrey, forcing him violently backward, pinned him down in his chair.
"I would kill you for this," he whispered, his face very close to Ronnie's; blood streaming from his lip.

"I would kill you for this, you clown! But I mean to kiss Helen again; and life, while it holds that prospect, is too sweet to risk losing for the mere pleasure of wiping you out.

Otherwise, I would kill you now, with my two hands." Then a black pulsating curtain rolled, in impenetrable folds, between Ronnie and that livid bleeding face, and he sank away--down--down--down--into silent depths of darkness and of solitude..