“It’s you who makes me afraid of myself,” he murmured, stooping closer to her. He spoke quite collectedly, though his face was a shade paler than before.
“You said to-morrow at three, I believe,” she observed in an icily abstracted voice. That tone, she remembered, had always served its purpose. It was conclusive, coolly dismissive. For she still refused to dignify that approach with opposition. She declined to recognize it, much less to combat it.
“Did I?” he said in a genuinely abstracted whisper, for his mind was not on what he said or heard. His mind, indeed, was fixed on only one thing. And that was her utterly defenseless loveliness. The blackness of his pupils and the aquiline cruelty about the corner of his eyes frightened her even more than his pallor.
But she did not give way to panic, for to do so was not the custom of her kind. She fought down her sudden weak impulse to cry out, her equally absurd propulsion to flight, her even more ridiculous temptation to break the window-panes in front of her with her clenched fist and scream for help.
For she realized, even before he made a move, that he was impervious to the weapons that had always served her. He stood beyond the frontiers of those impulses and reactions in which she moved and had her being. The very laws of her world meant nothing to him. It was like waking up and finding a burglar in the house, a burglar who knew no law but force.
So she wheeled slowly about, with her head up, watching him. There was a blaze like something perilously close to hate in her slightly widened eyes, for she knew, now, what lay ahead of her. Instinct, in one flash, told her what lurked beside her path. And her inability to escape it, to confront it with what it ought to be confronted with, was maddening.
“You Hun!” she said in a passionate small moan of misery which he mistook for terror. “Oh, you Hun!”
He could afford to smile down at her, fortified by her loss of fortitude, warm with the winy ichors of mastery.
“You adorable kid!” he cried out, catching the hand which she reached out to the window-frame to steady herself with.
“Don’t touch me!” she called out in a choking squeak of anger. And this time, as he swung her about, he laughed openly.