"I put that in only to make absolutely sure of getting you.... Growing cunning, you see."
"Oh--I didn't understand," said Cally, colorlessly, continuing to look down at her pink fingernails.
She seemed to think of nothing further to say, but that appeared to make no great difference. Hugo moved nearer. If he had remembered his thought about her being too sure of him, it may be that the sight of her had rushed his senses, as it had often done before.
"You were so unlike your natural dear self this afternoon," he said, on the wooing note; and suddenly he had possessed himself of both her hands. "To-night--and we've only such a little time--you are going to make it all up to me ... Aren't you?"
Finding herself captured, the girl hastily raised eyes dark with trouble, looking at her lover for the first time. And so looking, she took her hands from his grasp with a hastiness which might have been a little rasping to a morbidly sensitive man.
"Don't!--please don't! I--don't like to be touched.... I--I can only act as I feel, Hugo."
She turned away hurriedly, passed him and went over to the fireplace. There she stood quite silent before the dull red glow, locking and unlocking her slim fingers, and within her a spreading coldness.
Behind her she heard the thundering feet.
"I hoped, you see," said Hugo's voice, disappointed, but hardly chagrined, "that you would be feeling a little more--well, like your own natural self, after your rest ... Particularly as all our plans for these two days have been so upset."
She replied, after a pause, in a noticeably constrained voice: "I haven't said that I don't feel my natural self. That's only your--your interpretation of what you don't like.... I--that seems to be just the trouble between us."