“Hush!” she cried peremptorily. She stood away from him, panting heavily. Her face glowed with a veritable inner fire.
“It is for the last time, monsieur—be assured, it is for the last time,” she breathed out.
Then she blazed into uncontrollable passion:—
“Senseless, and a fool! I would have given you a soul to dare and to do. This is not a man but a block. It is right, monsieur: you would freeze the hot life in me—make it of your lead, this poor gold of my humanity. That other was better than you—he was better, for after all he could lie bravely. My God, to be so scorned and flouted! But, there you shall learn—ah, just a little lesson! You are very proud and high, yet I also shall be high if I choose.”
She checked herself, came up to and dared him in a rage of mockery.
“To-morrow we go to Putney. It is all arranged. And I have but to say the word, the little word, and I am Lady Murk! You twitted me with the child—my God, the man you are! What now, if his ghost—his image—were to thrust itself in between you and——”
The door was flung open—pushed, that is to say, with a respectful violence nicely significant of emergency. Jepps stood on the threshold.
“My lord, will your lordship please to come at once?”
So said this admirable man; and what need was to say more? Ned, in a moment, was in the dining-room.
Mademoiselle Théroigne had presumed a trifle too far on her desirability. At least, consulting her own interest, she should have withheld, one way or the other, from the beast of her ambition that incitement to feed passion with fire.