The word had an electrical effect upon him. He threw her off his lap and leapt to his feet.
“Yes,” he cried savagely and wildly, the train of his thoughts completely altered, “you’re all keeping him away from me! That’s what’s at the bottom of it! You’ve hidden Nance from me and given me this woman who looks like her but who can’t smile and laugh like my Nance, to deceive me and betray me! I know you—you staring, white-faced, frightened thing! You don’t deceive me! You don’t fool Adrian. I know you. You are not my Nance.”
She had staggered away, a few paces from him, when he first threw her off, and now, with a heart-rending effort, she tried to smooth the misery out of her face and to smile at him in her normal, natural way. But the effort was a ghastly mockery. It was little wonder, seeing her there, so lamentably trying to smile into his eyes, that he cried out savagely: “That’s not my Nance’s smile. That’s the smile of a cunning mask! You’ve hidden her away from me. Curse you all—you’ve hidden her away from me—and Baptiste, too! Where is my Baptiste—you staring white thing? Where is my Baptiste, you woman with a twisted mouth?”
He rushed fiercely towards her and seized her by the throat. “Tell me what you’ve done with him,” he cried, shaking her to and fro, and tightening his grasp upon her neck. “Tell me, you devil! Tell me, or I’ll kill you.”
Nance’s brain clouded and darkened. Her senses grew confused and misty. “He’s going to strangle me,” she thought, “and I don’t care! This pain won’t last long, and it will be death from his hand.”
All at once, however, in a sudden flash of blinding clearness, she realized what this moment meant. If she let him murder her, passively, unresistingly, what would become of him when she was dead? Simultaneously with this thought something seemed to rise up, strong and clear, from the depths of her being, something powerful and fearless, ready to wrestle with fate to the very end.
“He shan’t kill me!” she thought. “I’ll live to save us both.” Tearing frantically at his hands, she struggled backwards towards the open door, dragging him with her. In his mad blood-lust he was horribly, murderously strong; but this new life-impulse, springing from some supernatural level in the girl’s being, proved still stronger. With one tremendous wrench at his wrists she flung him from her; flung him away with such violence that he slipped and fell to the ground.
In a moment she had rushed through the doorway and closed and locked the heavy door behind her. Even at the very second she achieved this and staggered faint and weak against the wall, what seemed to her rapidly clouding senses a large concourse of noisy people carrying flickering lights, swept about her. As they came upon her she sank to the floor, her last impression being that of the great dark eyes of Philippa Renshaw illuminated by an emotion which was beyond her power of deciphering, an emotion in which her mind lost itself, as she tried to understand it, in a deep impenetrable mist, that changed to absolute darkness as she fainted away.