"Oh, yes, dear!" said Belinda, and she laughed. His gaunt, furious face filled her with fierce joy. He was paying—paying—paying. Drop by drop she would wring from him all that he owed her. She had never enjoyed anything more in her fierce, wilful little life—not even Loring's kisses—than she enjoyed lying to him now. For she was lying when she said that Cuthbridge had kissed her on her lips—at least, in the way that Morris meant. Perhaps one of her chief charms for the satiated young roué to whom she was engaged was her Cossack-maiden savagery of reluctance in matters of pre-marital love-making. But she chose that Morris should think that another man with the right to do it had kissed her as he had once kissed her, with no right but what her own love had given him.
He stood now, looking at her, his face inflamed with the strange fever of mingled hatred and desire. "Faugh!" he said at last, turning from her as from something sickening.
She laughed again, and began calmly selecting four of the largest lumps of sugar for her tea. As she did so, she hummed an air from the latest musical comedy. Oh, she had him! She had him "where she wanted him." He might rage round the arena of circumstance like an infuriated young bull. She was the Matadora who knew how to tame him.
He was back again in a moment or two. The red gleam of her cloak of insolence maddened and attracted him at the same time—just as a real Matador's cloak maddens and charms a real bull. He stood over her, hands in pockets, "to keep from wringing her neck," he told himself.
"Look here," he said. "I suppose you mean me to believe you love that bounder?"
"Why no—— What d'you take me for?" she said, a lump of sugar in one cheek. She crunched down on it contentedly with the last words.
"Better not ask what I take you for," said Loring hotly. "You're a cool hand, Linda; but I don't think you'd stay cool if I formulated my opinion of you."
"And I wonder if you'd stay at all if I gave my opinion of you?" asked she, grinning.
Loring clenched his hands that he still kept in his pockets.
"Do you mean to tell me," he said, "that you're going to marry this brute without loving him?"