One moment he hesitated, and then he pointed politely to the sofa.
“Go and sit down, please,” he suggested. It was no more then a courteous suggestion. “I shall remain here. I have no desire to approach you—if you’ll pardon my saying so.”
But she would not leave the window.
“It is natural that you should be overwrought,” he said.
“This is a damnable thing. You are too young to know the worst of it.”
“You are the worst of it!” she cried. “You.”
“No” as the chill of his even voice struck her, she wondered if he were really human. “Von Hillern would have been the worst of it. I stopped him at the front door and knew how to send him away. Now, listen, my good child. Hate me as ferociously as you like. That is a detail. You are in the house of a woman whose name stands for shame and infamy and crime.”
“What are you doing in it—” she cried again, “—in a place where girls are trapped—and locked up in top rooms—to be killed?”
“I came to take you away. I wish to do it quietly. It would be rather horrible if the public discovered that you have spent some hours here. If I had not slipped in when they were expecting von Hillern, and if the servants were not accustomed to the quiet entrance of well dressed men, I could not have got in without an open row and the calling of the policemen,—which I wished to avoid. Also, the woman downstairs knows me and realized that I was not lying when I said the house was surrounded and she was on the point of being ‘run in’. She is a woman of broad experience, and at once knew that she might as well keep quiet.”
Despite his cold eyes and the bad smile she hated, despite his almost dandified meticulous attire and the festal note of his white flower, which she hated with the rest—he was, perhaps, not lying to her. Perhaps for the sake of her mother he had chosen to save her—and, being the man he was, he had been able to make use of his past experiences.