"I couldn't very well go sailing in the grounds," said Belinda, with inextinguishable pertness. But she rose, and went upstairs to bed as the maternal finger indicated, making hideous, gargoylish faces all the way, which she did not dare turn to deliver.
And once, alone in her bedroom, having slammed the door so that the cottage jarred with it, she flung herself face down upon the floor, and sobbed furiously. With one clenched hand she beat the matting near her head. She strangled with this violent sobbing. Her whole body heaved with it.
"O God ... punish him!" choked Belinda. "O God ... help me to get even with him some day ... somehow...."
She rose after a half-hour of this frantic weeping; and, hiccoughing with spent grief, like a passionate child, went and unlocked a little drawer. She took out a photograph of Morris. Under it was written in her black, loopy handwriting, "My Hero and my Love." She gazed a moment at his face, all distorted and magnified by her tears; then she deliberately spat upon it, tore it in pieces, and ground them under her heel. "I hate you.... I hate you.... Beast!... Pig!... Liar!" choked the little fury. All at once, down she flopped, her skirt making a "cheese" about her, and gathered the desecrated morsels to her lips.
"Oh ... oh...." she moaned. "My heart is broken ... it's broken...."
Balling the fragments in her fist, and still seated on the floor, she shook her fist with the rags of love in it, at the empty air.
"I'll get even with you, Morry...." she said between her teeth, as though he were present in person. "I'll get even with you ... if I have to wait till I'm thirty!... Oh, I know you!... You dared to kiss me ... like that...." Her face flamed at the memory. "And then ... in less than a year ... oh!... But if you tired of me ... after just one kiss ... you'll tire of her ... after some hundreds.... Then, Mr. Morry...." Her beautiful face was quite savage—a woman's jealous face under the childish mop of hair—"then I'll be waiting! In two years I'll be eighteen.... I'll give you just two years ... then my innings begin...."
Belinda knew well that she was beautiful. She had known it supremely when she tempted Morris to kiss her—for she had tempted him—but then she loved him wildly. She was morally a little Oriental—with all her passions at white heat though she was but a schoolgirl. She had thought that his kiss meant that he loved her in like wise. He had been sorry the moment the kiss was over. But then—she had really tempted him beyond endurance, and he had always thought she had the most kissable mouth in the world. Besides, just at that psychological moment he happened to be bored to desperation. He had been spending the two weeks at Nahant that his mother always exacted from him in the summer. It was the only thing that she ever did exact from him, but they always seemed interminable. Then had come Belinda, tempting him with her passionate, sparkling eyes, and the desireful red fruit of her mouth ... fruit cleft for kisses....
He had hurried away the next day. He was honestly ashamed of that sensual kiss laid on a school-girl's lips. She was only fifteen then. He raged at himself and at her, too. "Kitten Cleopatra," he called her in his thought. "Amorous little devil— Jove! I pity her husband...."
For he never realised for an instant that the girl was really in love with him.