As my fingers applied the soap to my left thigh, I was suddenly startled. There was something there, that I had never before touched.

I leaned to my left side, my left leg extended and straight.

Suddenly things went almost black. I could not catch my breath. I looked in horror.

I had felt no pain.

But it had not been there the night before!

There was now a mark on my thigh. It was high on the thigh. The mark itself was about an inch and a half high. It was a graceful, cursive mark. In its way lovely. I knew it could not have been the result of a natural wound. It was in its way perfect, rather deep and clean. It was a deliberately, and precisely inflicted mark.

I gasped for breath, and felt for the wall to steady myself. Numbly, I washed the soap from my body and turned off the shower. I left the bathroom, still wet, and walked barefoot over the rug to stand before the full-length mirror at one side of the room. There, again I gasped, and again the room seemed to reel about me. On the mirror, which I had not noticed before, there was another mark. It had been drawn in my most scarlet lipstick on the surface of the mirror. It was more than a foot high, but it was the same mark that I wore on my thigh, that same graceful, cursive mark.

Disbelievingly, I looked at myself in the mirror. I touched again the mark on my thigh. I looked again at the red mark drawn in lipstick on the surface of the mirror. I beheld myself.

I knew almost nothing of these things, but there was no mistaking the lovely, deep, incised mark on my thigh.

Everything went black, and I collapsed to the rug before the mirror. I fainted. I had been branded.