He began to ask himself had not their being mingled somehow in essence? Had they not been really united by that vital process which sometimes makes married people grow to look alike, and often to die on the same day?
Intimately he knew this little woman, to her deepest soul secrets, and yet she had still eluded him, and now revealed subtle spiritual and physical charms he had never seen nor felt before.
He was conscious at the same time of a new feeling of repulsion on Kate’s part, and the thought filled him with nervous foreboding. Whatever change her disillusion had brought, his own physical infatuation for her was, if possible, deeper and more unreasonable.
She could not make him quarrel, but he would sit doggedly gloating over her beauty, his gray eyes flashing and gleaming with the fever for possession that is the soul of murder.
He was not long left in doubt as to the turn her thoughts had taken from the crisis through which she had passed. Her drawing-room was crowded. These receptions were protracted until long past midnight, and he had never seen her so gay or reckless in manner.
She dressed with a splendour never affected before, and received the attentions of Overman with a favour so marked it could not escape the eye of the most casual observer. She made not the slightest effort to conceal it, and her manner was so plain a challenge to Gordon he was stunned by its audacity.
Overman felt this challenge in her mood, and, alarmed, withdrew from the scene. He did not return to the house during the week, and on Saturday he received a dainty perfumed note from her by messenger. It was the first missive he had ever received from a woman.
He turned it over in his broad hand, touched it nervously, and opened it with his fingers trembling as he recognised her handwriting.
“My Dear Mr. Overman: I have been sorely disappointed in not seeing you again this week. I write to command your presence Sunday morning at ten o’clock to accompany me to the Temple, if I choose to go, and to dine with me. Sincerely, KATE RANSOM GORDON.”
He wrote an answer accepting and then sat holding this note in his hand as though it were something alive. For an hour he paced back and forth in his office alone, screening his eye behind his bushy brows, wrinkling his forehead, twisting his mouth, and now and then thrusting his hand into his collar and tugging at it, as though he were choking.