Again she shook her head.
“Blamed 'yporcrit,” he said feelingly, and then reflected: “He's one of the tame ones, ain't he?”
“You had better find out for yourself,” she said.
“You trust me. I don't want to die before you and I have made friends.” This was said with a strange air of feline gallantry. Then, tentatively: “But he could be brought to trust you, couldn't he?”
“Trust me?” she said, in a tone which bordered on despair, but which he mistook for derision.
“Stand in with us,” he urged. “Give the chuck to all this blamed 'yporcrisy. Perhaps, without being trusted, you have managed to find out something already, eh?”
“Perhaps I have,” she uttered with lips that seemed to her to be freezing fast.
Ricardo now looked at her calm face with something like respect. He was even a little awed by her stillness, by her economy of words. Womanlike, she felt the effect she had produced, the effect of knowing much and of keeping all her knowledge in reserve. So far, somehow, this had come, about of itself. Thus encouraged, directed in the way of duplicity, the refuge of the weak, she made a heroically conscious effort and forced her stiff, cold lips into a smile.
Duplicity—the refuge of the weak and the cowardly, but of the disarmed, too! Nothing stood between the enchanted dream of her existence and a cruel catastrophe but her duplicity. It seemed to her that the man sitting there before her was an unavoidable presence, which had attended all her life. He was the embodied evil of the world. She was not ashamed of her duplicity. With a woman's frank courage, as soon as she saw that opening she threw herself into it without reserve, with only one doubt—that of her own strength. She was appalled by the situation; but already all her aroused femininity, understanding that whether Heyst loved her or not she loved him, and feeling that she had brought this on his head, faced the danger with a passionate desire to defend her own.