At this point Irma burst into a flood of tears. ‘You are unkind; you are ungrateful!’ she sobbed. ‘We have done all we could for you, and you repay us by saying you hope you will soon go.’
Irma’s tears were more than Jack could bear. He felt he was making a muddle of things. Ungrateful! Why, if he lived a hundred years he would never forget their kindness!
He stepped to the angry girl and laid one hand on her arm.
‘Countess,’[7] he said, ‘you do not understand. It is duty calls me, not inclination. I am a soldier and’——
The door was suddenly flung violently open, and Vladimir Sominoff rushed in. ‘So, dog, scum!’ he hissed, ‘you dare to lay finger on a daughter of the house of Pauloff;’ and he struck at Jack.
Irma, however, threw herself in front of him. ‘Touch him if you dare!’ she cried, her eyes blazing like those of a tigress.
Sominoff choked back his rage and gave vent to a mocking laugh. ‘Stand aside,’ he said, seizing her by the wrist, ‘the countess shall talk to you. I will settle with this clod.’
‘Coward, you hurt me!’ she cried in cutting tones; ‘but it is only what one might expect from a man who would leave a helpless prisoner to be frozen to death on a winter’s night.’
This allusion to Jack maddened Sominoff. He must have squeezed her wrist, for she screamed out. Next moment, however, the gaudily uniformed Hussar was sprawling on the floor, dashed there by a blow from Jack’s fist.
With a hoarse cry he leapt to his feet, and tearing his sword from the scabbard rushed on Jack. The latter snatched up a chair and stood facing the infuriated Russian.