"Not here," she commanded. "Not now."
He gave a hard laugh and shrugged his shoulders.
"It had to come some time, I suppose," he said coolly. "I am not sorry."
"Nor I," she replied. "But will you please go now? We'll meet later—in the hotel."
He looked her up and down with that glance which she had learned to dread, and for a moment it seemed as if he would yield to that ungovernable passion in him and seize her in his arms. Rosemary did not move. Her luminous eyes, abnormally dilated, never left his face for one instant. She watched the struggle in the man's tortuous soul, the passion turned to hatred now that he stood revealed. She did not flinch, because she was not afraid. The man was too vile to inspire fear.
"Go!" she said coldly.
For another second he hesitated, but it was the banal sound of Buriecha spluttering and coughing the other side of the door that clinched his resolve. This was neither the place nor the time to assert his will, to punish her for the humiliation which he was enduring. Once more he laughed and shrugged his shoulders, then he walked slowly out of the room.
[CHAPTER XLIV]
For over half an hour Rosemary waited in that bare, cheerless room, and gazed unseeing out of the window while she tried vainly to co-ordinate her thoughts. In the forefront of her mind there was a feeling of great joy which she hardly dared to analyze. Joy! And she also had the feeling, though she had come to the very brink of an awful precipice, though she was looking down into an abyss of shame and horror, with no hope of ever being able to bridge the chasm over, that yet on the other side was peace—peace that she would never attain, but which was there nevertheless, to dwell on, to dream of, when the turmoil was past and she be allowed to rest.
After about half an hour the young officer who had first conducted her to the fateful spot came back to see what had happened. He seemed astonished that she was still there.