“Your hand,” he cried.
She obeyed; he seized it with avidity as if eager to raise it to his lips, but halfway up released his grasp. They looked at each other for a time.
“What's the matter, dear?” she whispered timidly.
“Neither force nor conviction,” Heyst muttered wearily to himself. “How am I to meet this charmingly simple problem?”
“I am sorry,” she murmured.
“And so am I,” he confessed quickly. “And the bitterest of this humiliation is its complete uselessness—which I feel, I feel!”
She had never before seen him give such signs of feeling. Across his ghastly face the long moustaches flamed in the shade. He spoke suddenly:
“I wonder if I could find enough courage to creep among them in the night, with a knife, and cut their throats one after another, as they slept! I wonder—”
She was frightened by his unwonted appearance more than by the words in his mouth, and said earnestly:
“Don't you try to do such a thing! Don't you think of it!”