He paced up and down, the silver spurs on his heels clanking.
"We must have some light," he said. "Clearness is essential to the matter in hand."
He rang for the man-servant who had smiled in that sly, mocking way. The man lighted the jets of the chandelier and retired, with a sidelong inquisitive glance at Lilly--but no smile this time.
She was still sitting on the couch where she had been when she regained consciousness. Her mind seemed a blank as she twirled her old felt hat round and round.
In the brilliant light cast from the ceiling she saw the colonel in all his resplendence, still silently brooding, as he paced up and down.
She could look him quite calmly in the face now. "It's useless to try and defend myself," she thought, "so I don't care what he does."
Next he seized a chair and planted it in front of her, so close that when he sat down his knees nearly touched hers.
"Listen to me, child," he began, his words ringing out clear and incisive, like words of command. "While you lay here in your swoon I was thinking over in the next room very earnestly what's to be done. I came to a decision about your future; but of that later. You, of course, must have observed by this time that my sentiments with regard to you are not exactly paternal. The older I grow the less am I able to understand what so-called paternal feelings are. To cut the matter short, I have conceived a passion for you which astonishes myself.... If I were ten years older--I am fifty-four--I should attribute it to senility. Do you know what that means?"
Lilly shook her head. She could see his face now so clearly that to her dying day she could never have forgotten what it was like.
His eyes flamed in their red sockets and pierced her with the rapier-like sharpness that had at first filled her with terror. In grey bristling strands his hair was brushed back from the temples; but his moustache, on the other hand, was coal-black, and shadowed his gloomy mouth like a patch of ink through which his teeth made a white line of demarcation. From the corners of his mouth the heavy folds of flesh descended into the collar of his uniform.