There was a pause. Hawke suddenly stripped the letters off the file.
"I will give them to you," he said.
Kate held out her hands to him eagerly, with a low cry of joy. But Hawke dropped the packet on the table, and seized her outstretched wrists.
"But they have their price," he whispered, bending over her.
Kate shrank away in a whirl of terror. But his grasp only tightened, and he drew her towards him, laughing.
"Only a kiss," he said. "One kiss for each."
"No!" She almost shouted the word.
"Hush!" he laughed. "You will rouse the house. One kiss for each," and he laughed again almost hysterically.
"It is not a heavy price--it is not even a new price. You have paid it before with nothing to buy. Think of the distance you have come, of the horrible lonely pass!"
He repeated her words with a burlesque shudder. But the taunts fell upon deaf ears. Kate was engrossed in the shame of his proposal. It was so characteristic of him, she thought. He had chosen the one device which would humiliate her most effectually. Its very puerility added to her sense of degradation. There was a touch of the ludicrous in the notion so grotesquely incongruous with the pain it caused her. She pictured the scene with a spectator. "How he would laugh!" she thought, bitterly. However, there would be no spectator--and it was the only way.