"And I want to help you," he added. "I want that privilege more than I want anything else in the world."
For a long moment she sat still, as if considering his words, her eyes on her hands, folded in her lap. The strange, deep flush he had noticed once before again stained her face. At last she straightened up with a quick movement, throwing back her shoulders as if to take on again some burden they had almost cast off.
"I am sorry to seem so mysterious," she said, "and so unresponsive. I will tell you this much, and it is more than I ought to say. In the situation we are in I am in his power, horribly so. He can crush me at any time he chooses."
"Then why doesn't he?"
The gentleness of her caller's voice softened the brusqueness of his words.
"Because—" She stopped again. For the first time she had become embarrassed and self-conscious. She made her climax in a rush: "Lately he insists that he has fallen in love with me!"
Laurie uttered an ejaculation. It was not a pretty one, but it nicely fitted the emergency.
"He has hoped that to save myself, and others, I will marry him, the contemptible, crawling snake!"
The listener was impressed by her comparison. Certainly there was something ophidian about Shaw. He himself had noticed it.
"Then, for the time being, you're really safe?" he suggested.