He paused, scanning their pale, drawn faces. He turned to Ned first, but the latter was too immersed in his own despair ever to return his stare. Lenore didn’t raise her golden head to meet his eyes. But before his gaze ever got to her, Bess was on her feet.
“Don’t be too sure of yourself,” she cautioned quickly. He looked with sudden amazement into her kindling eyes. “Men like you have gone in the face of society before. You’re not so far up here that the arm of the law can’t reach you.”
The blond man smiled into her earnest face. “Go on, my dear,” he urged.
“It’s got you once, and it’ll get you again. And I warn you that if you put one indignity on us, do one thing you’ve said—you’ll pay for it in the end—just as you’ll pay for that fiendish crime you committed to-day.”
As her eyes met his, straight and unfaltering, the expression of contemptuous amazement died in his face. Presently his interest seemed to quicken. It was as if he had seen her for the first time, searching eyes resting first on hers, then on her lips, dropping down over her athletic form, and again into her eyes. He seemed lost in sinister speculations.
Something seemed strained, ready to break. The four in the little circle made no motion, all of them inert and frozen like characters in a dream. And then, before that speculative, searching gaze—a gaze unlike any that he had bent on Lenore—her eyes faltered from his. Ned felt a wild, impotent fury like live steam in his brain.
Bess’s little mutiny was already quelled. Her blue eyes were black with terror.
XVI
Doomsdorf had seemingly achieved his purpose, and his prisoners lay crushed in his hands. A fear infinitely worse than that of toil or hardship had evidently killed the fighting spirit in Bess; Lenore had been broken by Doomsdorf’s first words. And now all the structure of Ned’s life had seemingly toppled about him.
The lesson that Doomsdorf taught had gone deep, not to be forgotten in any happier moment that life might have in store for him. There was no blowing into flame the ashes of his old philosophy. It was dead and cold in his breast; no matter what turn fate should take, his old conceit and self-sufficiency could never come again. He was down to earth at last. The game had been too big for him. The old Ned Cornet was dead, and only a broken, impotent, hopeless thing was left to dwell in his battered body.