"I wish you would go back," she said in a tone she used to delirious patients in the hospital. "We are almost at the house, and Mr. Blackburn wouldn't like your coming to Briarlay."
"Well, the old chap's in town, isn't he?"
"It is time for him to come home. He may be here any moment." Though she tried to reason the question with him, she was conscious of a vague, uneasy suspicion that they were rapidly approaching the state where reasoning would be as futile as flight. Then she remembered hearing somewhere that a drunken man would fall down if he attempted to run, and she considered for an instant making an open dash for the house.
"I'll go, if you'll let me come back to-morrow. I'm not a bad fellow, Miss Meade." A sob choked him. "I've got a really good heart—ask Anna Jeannette if I haven't——"
"I don't care whether you are bad or not. I don't want to know anything about you. Only go away. Nothing that you can do will make me like you," she threw out unwisely under the spur of anger. "Women never think that they can cajole or bully a person into caring—only men imagine they have the power to do that, and it's all wrong because they can't, and they never have. Bullying doesn't do a bit more good than whining, so please stop that, too. I don't like you because I don't respect you, and nothing you can say or do will have the slightest effect unless you were to make yourself into an entirely different sort of man—a man I didn't despise." Her words pelted him like stones, and while he stood there, blinking foolishly beneath the shower, she realized that he had not taken in a single sentence she had uttered. He looked stunned but obstinate, and a curious dusky redness was beating like a pulse in his forehead.
"You can't fight me," he muttered huskily. "Don't fight me."
"I am not fighting you. I am asking you to go away."
"I told you I'd go, if you'd let me come back to-morrow."
"Of course I shan't. How dare you ask me such a thing? Can't you see how you disgust me?"
As she spoke she made a swift movement toward the turn in the lane, and the next minute, while her feet slipped on the ice, she felt Roane's arms about her, and knew that he was struggling frantically to kiss her lips. For years no man had kissed her, and as she fought wildly to escape, she was possessed not by terror, but by a blind and primitive fury. Civilization dropped away from her, and she might have been the first woman struggling against attack in the depths of some tropic jungle. "I'd like to kill you," she thought, and freeing one arm, she raised her hand and struck him between the eyes. "I wonder why some woman hasn't killed him before this? I believe I am stronger than he is."