“You needn’t pity her, Adrian,” she went on, casting a bitter smile at Linda’s bowed head as the young girl hid her face against his shoulder. “There’s no need to pity her. She’s just like all the rest of us, only she doesn’t play the game frankly and honestly as I do. Send her home to her sister, as she says, and come with me across the park. I’ll show you that oak tree if you’ll come—the one I told you about, the one that’s haunted.”
She threw at him a long deep look, full of a subtle challenge, and stretched out her hand as if to separate him from the clinging child. Sorio returned her look and a mute struggle took place between them. Then his face hardened.
“I must go back with her,” he said. “I must take her to Nance.”
“Nonsense!” she rejoined, her eyes darkening and changing in colour. “Nonsense, my dear! She’ll find her way all right. Come! I really want you. Yes, I mean what I say, Adrian. I really want you this time!”
The expression with which she challenged him now would have delighted the great antique painters of the feminine mystery. The gates of her soul seemed to open inwards, on magical softly-moving hinges, and an incalculable power of voluptuous witchcraft emanated from her whole body.
It is doubtful whether a spell so provocative could have been resisted by any one of an origin different from Sorio’s. But he had in him—capable of being roused at moments—the blood of that race in which of all others women have met their match. To this witchcraft of the north he opposed the marble-like disdain of the south—the disdain which has subtlety and knowledge in it—the disdain which is like petrified hatred.
His face darkened and hardened until it resembled a mask of bronze.
“Good-bye,” he said, “for the present. We shall meet again—perhaps to-morrow. But anyway, good-bye! Come, Linda, my child.”
“Perhaps to-morrow—and perhaps not!” returned Philippa bitterly. “Good-bye, Linda. I’ll give your love to Brand!”
Sorio said little to his companion as he escorted her back to her lodging in the High Street. He asked her no questions and seemed to take it as quite a natural thing that she should have been out at that early hour. They discovered Dr. Raughty in the house when they arrived, doing his best to dissuade Nance from any further desperate hunt after the wanderer, and it was in accordance with the doctor’s advice, as well as their own weariness that the two sisters spent the later morning hours of their August Bank-holiday in a profound and exhausted sleep.