"Why did you do that?" she asked quietly.
There was no anger in her tone or spirit; no sorrow, no surprise. She was curiously impersonal.
The fox showed his teeth.
"I'll do worse than that yet," he said.
The girl found herself gulping.
She looked at him through shining eyes. And as she did so it came in upon her that this degraded creature had once been beautiful. Ruin as he was, there was still about him something tragic and forlorn as of a great moor over which a beaten host has retreated, leaving desolation in its wake.
The man in the Gap wrung his wrist.
The girl took a step toward him.
"May I look at it?" she said.
He glanced up at her again, much as glances a dog which has had a licking and is uncertain whether the hand stretched out is that of an enemy or a friend.