Her tone sank to a honeyed sweetness. “You’re most awfully far away. If you don’t come nearer, we might just as well——”
“As I came along the passage,” he said, “I heard you laughing. I haven’t done much laughing lately.”
A frown crept into her eyes. “That was because I was going to see you.”
He wished he could believe her.
In a desperate effort to win him to pleasantness, she closed up the space that separated them. His coldness piqued her. Through her filmy garment her body touched him; it was burning. “And I—I haven’t done much laughing lately, either; but one can’t be always tragic.” Her voice was tremulous and sultry. She brushed against him and peered into his face reproachfully. “You aren’t very sympathetic.”
“Not very.”
She tried the effect of irritation. “I wish you wouldn’t keep on catching at what I say.” Then, with a return to her sweetness: “Do be kind, Meester Deck. You don’t know how badly I need you.”
Something deep and emotional stirred within him. Perhaps it was memory—perhaps habit All his life he had been waiting for just that—for her to need him; it had begun years ago when Hal had told him of the price that she would have to pay. Perhaps it was love struggling in the prison that her indifference had created for it It might be merely the sex response to her closeness.
“I came because you wrote that you needed me. But your laughing and the way you met me——”
“I was nervous and—and you don’t know why.”