Like a powerful drug the brutal truth attacked her brain. It was as if its higher nerve centres could no longer act. She was completely in the power of this man. And only too well did she know that he knew it.
Inevitably as fate, those slim fingers dipped towards the side of her chair. “What have we here?” The inflexion was lightly playful, yet it drove all the blood from her heart. “May I look?” His hand closed on the parcel before she could muster one futile finger to stay it.
Galvanized, as if by electricity, she sprang up from her chair without knowing what she did. “Please—it’s mine!” Without conscious volition she tried weakly to defend her property.
He put her off with the cheery playfulness of a teasing brother. “Just one little peep,” he said. The treasure was yielding its wrappings already to those deft fingers. Smiling all the time, he treated the thing as a mere joke. And he was able to give the joke full effect, because, not for an instant did he expect it to turn out anything else.
XXXIX
Adolph Keller gave a low whistle. He took in his breath quickly. The treasure, in its rare incredible beauty, had declared itself to his eyes. And to the eyes of an artist, wholly unready for the revelation, it came in a single devastating flash.
“My God!” he said, in a whisper, half rapture, half surprise.
Aglow with excitement he removed the shade from the electric lamp. Holding the picture beneath the light, an arm’s length away from his eyes, he turned it over several times in that fashion of the expert which June had now learned to dread. And then humming softly, and with his fingers still enclosing it, he passed beyond the screen to a table on which lay a microscope.
With a feeling of nausea, June watched everything he did. Only too well she knew that the microscope would simply feed his excitement. In a fresh spasm of weakness, she reeled against the chimneypiece. She had now the sensation of having fallen over a precipice into a bottomless pit. Already she was sinking down, down, down into night and damnation.
Keller soon returned, microscope in hand; and while he plied it under the lamp she dare not glance at his face. Passively she waited for his next words. The power of action had left her.