She stopped abruptly, for he caught her by the arm and held her. Jerry said that even yet he was timid of her delicacy—fearful of the things he had thought her to be. But he still held her, though she struggled to get away from him.
"Let me go, Jerry. You're hurting me. Please let me go."
She felt the first touch of his imperviousness when he refused to release her and chose to change her tone.
"Please let me go, Jerry," she pleaded softly. "Do you think you are treating me kindly, after all—all that is between us? I don't care for Chan—I don't, Jerry. Let me go."
In his eyes she read the new judgment.
"Then you're worse than I supposed," he muttered.
"Worse! Oh, Jerry. Don't look so—so coldly. It hurts me terribly. I must go. I can't stand your looking at me in that way."
She tried to move away, I think she had every intention of taking to her heels if Jerry had only given her the chance. But he wouldn't. He held her and kept her close beside him. He was hurting her wrist cruelly.
"Let me go," she cried, struggling anew.
Her resistance aroused him again. The animal fury of battle had not died out of his eyes. He did not know what he intended to do with her—had no plan, no purpose, he said. What plan or purpose could he have had unless murder? And even in his madness I'm sure that that never occurred to him. But his blood was hot and his anger and bitterness overwhelming. His fear of her delicacy diminished with her struggles, for her resistance inflamed him. He did not know, nor did she just then, that the animal instinct to conquer was what she had taught him, and that the turgid stream of his blood was finding new strength and unreason, a strange new impetus in every struggle. She saw her danger and was powerless to prevent it. She looked over her shoulder helplessly in the direction in which Chan Lloyd had vanished and saw no help from there. Jerry's great strength had never seemed so terrible as now. He caught her by the shoulders and held her, shook her, I think, a little, as one would shake a child, while she still struggled in his grasp. In a moment his grasp loosened a little, then tightened again, for the contact of his fingers with her warm skin was awaking the demon in him, the dormant devil she had put there.