The walls of the room seemed to be closing in upon her. She felt her feet slip away from under her. Desperately she tried to recover her balance, failed, sought to cling to the table but felt her hands could find no hold upon the hard wood.
And then there came the consciousness of his arms surrounding her. He lifted her, he held her to him, and she felt again the awful flame of his look, consuming her.
“And I loved you!” he said. “I—loved you!”
She fought against him breathlessly, feeling that if his lips touched hers life would never be endurable again. But he mastered her without apparent effort. He conquered her slowly, with a fiendish precision that was as iron to her soul. With that dreadful smile upon his face he overcame her spasmodic struggles for freedom. He kissed her, and by his kiss he quelled her resistance; for she felt the fires of hell, and fainted in his hold.
CHAPTER XIII
ESCAPE
Was it a dream—a nightmare of her fevered brain? Was she back again in the tortures of her long illness, with Lucy and Nell whispering behind the screen, wondering how soon the end would come? Had she imagined that dreadful struggle against overwhelming odds? If so, why was she lying here, gazing at the fitful firelight on the oak rafters of the kitchen instead of on her bed upstairs? Or was this too a dream—a strange, illogical fantasy of her diseased imaginings?
She was very tired—that much she knew—sick with long delirium or too great exertion. Her limbs were as lead. And at the back of her mind there hovered that dreadful shadow—was it memory? Was it illusion?—that filled her with a sense of terror indescribable.
But consciousness was returning. Her brain was groping for the truth, and the truth was coming to her gradually, inevitably, inexorably. She remembered her flight down the stairs, her headlong fall in the passage. She remembered the coming of Arthur, the brief interview in the kitchen, his terrible unspoken accusation. She remembered his kiss. . . .
Again the anguish burned her soul; she thrust it from her with a sick shudder. It was more than she could bear.
Then she awoke to the fact that she was lying on the stones before the fire with a man’s coat spread under her. Trembling, she raised herself and found she was alone.