It wasn't just that he was losing patience with her. There was a heightened tenseness in him, a kind of muscular rigidity that was making his neckcords bulge, his shoulders stiffen. She could sense it, feel it—that dangerous tension mounting in him.
He might want to search for the gun first, but there were times when the human mind went out of control, lost all of its capacity to reason intelligently.
His face was twisting terribly. She tried not to look at him, tried to avoid his eyes, and managed to do so for an instant. But she knew he was still looking at her, that his eyes were burning with a slow, merciless kind of rage simply because she had discovered the truth about him.
He was drawing closer to her suddenly. His feet made a scuffling sound as he advanced upon her and he was breathing in a strange way, hoarsely, almost raspingly.
Closer he came and closer, but still she dared not look at him. And then she did look and saw the glaze of fury in his eyes and she screamed in wild terror, knowing even as she screamed that no help could come to her.
She fought him desperately, trying to push his arms away, trying to get free of his arms that were beginning to tighten about her. It wasn't a lust-crazed lover's embrace. If only it had been there might have been some hope for her. But how could she hope to escape from the embrace of a man so goaded, the embrace of a man who thought that his own life would be forfeited if he did not silence her quickly and forever.
The harder she struggled the closer his arms came and then it wasn't his arms but his hands she had most to fear. They were reaching for her throat and there was no way she could keep them from encircling her throat and tightening cruelly, no way of avoiding the strangling grip of his strong, muscular fingers.
His thumbs sank into the soft flesh just above her wind-pipe, and began to press ... and to press....
She could only shake her head, frantically back and forth, and plead dumbly. "No. Please don't. There's no need. I'd have thrown the gun—"
When he finally arose and left her she was lying stretched out full length on the floor, her sightless eyes staring straight up at the ceiling, as if it were a great, rushing river sweeping above her and carrying with it a gun which he spent thirty-five minutes trying to find, ransacking the apartment and cursing softly from time to time, and even crying out once in savage rage and frustration.