“Begin as soon as you like, the sooner the better. Are you quite sure you won’t have just a spot?” Again he pointed to the bottle on the table. “You look as if you want a drop of something.”
Once more June declined the offer in a voice which in her own ear seemed absurdly small and faint.
“Pity,” said Mr. Keller cheerfully, as he looked at her. “It’d put some life in you.” And then, as she was still inert, he went on in a tone which pleasantly mingled gentlemanliness and business, “I always pay a sovereign an hour, you know—for the altogether.”
A light of fear came into June’s large eyes. “Does it mean,” she asked, shyly and awkwardly, as she looked away from him, “that I shall have to take off my clothes?”
“Why, of course,” he said, matter-of-factly. Her obvious embarrassment was not lost upon him, but the knowledge did not appear in his manner.
June shivered slightly. In that shiver a deep instinct spoke for her. “I couldn’t do that,” she said.
“Why not?” He lit a cigarette. “Aren’t you well?”
June was very far from well. She felt within an ace of being overcome by all that had happened to her. Besides her bruised shoulders were still aching horribly. Even without the deep instinct that governed her, it would not have been possible to expose them.
“No-no,” she said, “I—I’m not well.”
As she spoke, she had to fight a powerful desire to burst into tears. But her latent fear of this man had suddenly grown. Overdriven as she was, however, she was yet conscious of a stern need to keep a hold upon herself. She knew nothing, less than nothing of her host, beyond the fact that he was smooth of speech. On the surface he was a gentleman, but as he stood looking down at her now she glimpsed in his dark eyes that which seemed to countervail everything.