She sprang to the door her eyes gleaming, her hands holding the little soft body with desperate firmness. But he was before her, he looked down at her with white face, and eyes blazing with scorn.
‘You are not fit to hold him,’ he said.
She was moving across to the second door clasping her burden convulsively.
‘I will die before you shall have him,’ she said passionately.
‘No you will not,’ he said.
His words came slowly, there was a horrible note in his voice, ‘There is—your lover, you know.’
She turned and looked at him, incredulous horror in her wide eyes, her arms loosened their hold a little, she went a step towards him. But the light of madness in his eyes increased, he tore the child from her arms, and carried it away with him out into the night.
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[p 150]
]He went slowly down the hill he had come up in such wild haste. He had not felt the night wind before, but now it blew chillily on his burning forehead and quietened the fever in his blood. He took off his coat and wrapped it round the child, which lay warm and sleepy and quiet against his shoulder all the way.
There had seemed to be a strange wheel working in his brain lately, it had gone at a maddening rate during his short interview with Dot. But something in the great hush of the grey-blue night stopped it for a time and a sudden calmness and power of reasoning came to him once more.