"And when do you expect to meet again?" Mordaunt asked, with great distinctness.
She flinched as if he had struck her. "Oh, haven't you tortured me enough?" she said.
His jaw hardened. He stepped suddenly to her and took her by the shoulders. His eyes appalled her. It was as if a devil looked out of them. She shrank away from him in sheer physical terror.
"Oh, you needn't be afraid," he said. "I shan't hurt you. Why should I? You are nothing to me. But—for the last time—let me hear you speak the truth. You love this man?"
The words, curt and cold, might have fallen from the lips of a stranger, so impersonal were they, so utterly devoid of any emotion.
Wide-eyed, she faced him, for she could not look away with his hands upon her, compelling her.
"You love this man?" he repeated, his speech still cold but incisive—a sharp weapon probing for the truth.
She caught her quivering nerves together, and valiantly answered him. "I do!" she said. "I do!" And as she spoke, the power within her surged upwards, defying constraint, dominating her with a mastery irresistible. She suddenly stripped her heart bare of all reserve and showed him the love that agonized there. "I have always loved him!" she said. "I shall love him till I die!"
It was a woman's confession, in which triumph and anguish were strangely mingled. In a calmer moment she would never have made it, but that moment was supreme, and she had no choice. Regardless of all consequences, she told the burning truth. She would have told it with his hands upon her throat.
In the silence that followed the avowal she even waited for violence. But she was unafraid. The greatness of the power that possessed her had lifted her above all fear. She trod the heights where fear is not. And all-unconsciously, in that moment she won a battle which she had deemed irrevocably lost.