“Congratulate you! If I saw you drowning in the harbour, would you expect me to stand at the Battery waving my hand to you and congratulating you? No, I don’t congratulate you. You had the chance of being happy with the most beautiful girl in the world, and the best, and you’ve thrown it away to pick up with that woman. Phyl would have married you, I know it, she would have made you happy, I know it, for I know her and I know you. Now it’s all spoiled.”
He rose to his feet. It was the first time in his life that he had seen Maria Pinckney really put out.
“I’ll talk to you again about it,” said he. Then he moved away.
He had the pleasure of watching Frances dancing the next waltz with Silas Grangerson, and Silas had the pleasure of watching him as he stood talking to one of the elderly ladies and looking on.
Silas’s rabbit trap was in reality a very simple affair, it was a plan to pick a quarrel with Richard through Frances, if possible; to make the imperturbable Pinckney angry, knowing well how easily an angry man can be induced to make a fool of himself. To keep cool and let Richard do the shouting.
Unfortunately for Silas, the sight of Phyl in all her beauty had raised his temperature far above the point of coolness. There were moments when he was dancing, when he could have flung Frances aside, torn Phyl from the arms of her partner and made off with her through the open window.
This dance was a deadly business for him. It was the one thing needed to cap and complete the strange fascination this girl exercised upon his mind, his imagination, his body. It was only now that he realised that nothing else at all mattered in the world, it was only now that he determined to have her or die.
Silas was of the type that kills under passion, the type that, unable to have, destroys.
Preparing a trap for another, he himself had walked into a trap constructed by the devil, stronger than steel.
Yet he never once approached or tried to speak to Phyl. He fed on her at a distance. Fleeting glimpses of the curves of her figure, the Titian red of her hair, the face that to-night might have turned a saint from his vows, were snatched by him and devoured. He would not have danced with her if he could. To take her in his arms would have meant covering her face with kisses. Nor did he feel the least anger against the men with whom she danced. All that was a sham and an unreality, they were shadows. He and Phyl were the only real persons in that room.