He moved, and went close to her. Still she did not shrink. She was fighting desperately—desperately—a losing battle.
"Well," he said, after a moment, in which she withstood him silently with all her strength, "in one sense that is true. I did serve my own purpose. But have you, I wonder, any idea what that purpose of mine was?"
He waited, but she did not answer him. She was nearly at the end of her strength. Hyde did not offer to touch her. He only smiled a little at the rising panic in her white face.
"Do you know what I am going to do now?" he said. "I am going to mess—it's a guest night—and they will drink my health as the winner of the Ghantala Cup. And then I shall propose someone else's health. Can you guess whose?"
She shrank then, shrank perceptibly, painfully, as the victim must shrink, despite all his resolution, from the hot iron of the torturer.
Hyde stood for a second longer, watching her. Then he turned. There was fiendish triumph in his eyes.
"Good-bye!" he said.
She caught her breath sharply, spasmodically, as one who suppresses a cry of pain. And then, before he reached the window, she spoke:
"Please wait!"
He turned instantly, and came back to her.