She had meant to call him back to earth, but not like this! Here was again the incomprehensible look that had rested upon her at dinner, but with an added fierceness of anger so foreign to all she had known of him that she felt as if it slashed her.
“Oh, what has happened? David, what have I done?”
She clasped and wrung her hands. On her heat of pleading his answer fell like ice.
“Done?” he echoed, with that pale smile that seemed to mock at itself; “done, my fair cousin? Nothing in truth that anyone—I least of all—could find fault with. It would be as wise to chide the winds for shifting from north to south as to hold a woman responsible for her own nature.”
His light tones was in startling contrast with the flame of his eye. All unaware of any incident of the day that could have afforded ground for this change, she found as yet no clue in his words to guide her.
“David, David—what is it?” she cried again.
In the anguish of her desire to break down the barrier between them, to get close to his soul again, she stepped towards him, hardly noticing that he drew back from her until he was brought up by the parapet of the platform. When he could retreat no further, he threw out his hand with a forbidding gesture.
She stood obedient but bewildered, as a child that is threatened though it knows not why. The winds of the summer night played with the tendrils of her hair and softly blew the fair white fabric of her gown closer against her, while the tide of moon rays, pouring over her bare shoulders and arms, glorifying the smooth skin with a radiant gleam as of mother-of-pearl, flashed back in scintillations from the burnished embroideries of her robes; so that, with the heaving of her breast and the tremor which shook her whole frame, she seemed to be enveloped with running silver fires.
Something—a passion, a mad desire—flickered into the man’s face, as if, for an instant, a hidden fire had leapt up. The next instant this was succeeded by the former cruel gaze of contempt and anger, the more intense because so icily controlled. Once more measuring her from head to foot, he murmured, with an extraordinary bitterness of accent:
“Are all women either fools or wantons?”