His effrontery stung her into what was almost a state of frenzy. Her eyes blazed their utmost scorn. She had never been less afraid of him than at that moment. She had never hated him more intensely.
"You could make him do a thing like that," she said. "And yet you couldn't hold him back from certain death!"
He answered her without heat, in a tone she deemed most hideously callous. "It was not my business to hold him back. He was wanted. There would have been no rescue but for him. They needed a man to lead them, or they wouldn't have gone at all."
His composure goaded her beyond all endurance. She scarcely waited for him to finish, nor was she wholly responsible for what she said.
"Was there only one man among you, then?" she asked, with headlong contempt.
He made her a curious, jerky bow. "One man—yes," he said. "The rest were mere sheep, with the exception of one—who was a cripple."
Her heart contracted suddenly with a pain that was physical. She felt as if he had struck her, and it goaded her to a fiercer cruelty.
"You knew he would never come back!" she declared her voice quivering uncontrollably with the passion that shook her. "You—you never meant him to come back!"
He opened his eyes wide for a single instant, and she fancied that she had touched him. It was the first time in her memory that she had ever seen them fully. Instinctively she avoided them, as she would have avoided a flash of lightning.
And then he spoke, and she knew at once that her wild accusation had in no way hurt him. "You think that, do you?" he said, and his tone sounded to her as though he barely repressed a laugh. "Awfully nice of you! I wonder what exactly you take me for."