“Thank you. I prefer to stand.”
“I don’t,” seating himself upon a boulder and puffing deliberately at his cigar. “Please yourself, however. And now kindly give me your best attention.”
Then for the next twenty minutes he did all the talking, though every now and then an ejaculation of anger, disgust, or dissidence would escape her. This, however, affected him not in the slightest degree. The cold, cutting, sarcastic tones flowed evenly on, laying down the details of what was to her a strange and startling plan. Not until he had unfolded it in all its bearings did he pause, as though to invite comment.
But by that time it was noticeable that the horror and decisiveness in her refusal to co-operate with which the woman had first received his suggestion had undergone a very marked abatement. She could even bring herself to discuss the scheme in some of its details.
“Now,” he concluded—“now you see I am practically proposing to be Laura’s greatest benefactor; yours, too, in a secondary degree, for the event will render you, to a large extent, free from my bondage.”
“That indeed would be to benefit me,” she answered, with a return of the old, rancorous aversion. “But even now the motive you have given is not above suspicion. It is too inadequate.”
“Not so. If you look at it all round you will perceive it is complete. I am of a revengeful disposition, and now, after half a lifetime, I see my opportunity for taking a most sweeping revenge. But I like my retribution to be as original as it is far-reaching. This one is. In fact, it is unique.”
How unique it was even she could not at the moment fathom. But she was destined to learn it later, in all its grim and undreamed-of horror.
“I hope I may be allowed to change my mind,” said Mrs Daventer, sweetly, as she entered the bureau of the hotel that afternoon. “I wish to counter-order the arrangements I made for leaving to-morrow. It can be managed, I hope?”
“I will see immediately, madame,” said the civil employé, looking up from the pile of letters he was sorting, and which had just come in. “I tink de mules are already ordered. One moment—I will just inquire.”