"Well, you made an awful fuss about it!"
"Just thought of something—suddenly——"
"I thought you were going to bite my head off and then that something bit you!"
Again she laughed and walked slowly to the door, her greenish eyes watching him with studied carelessness, as a cat a mouse. Every movement of her figure was music, her smile contagious, and, by a subtle mental telepathy, she knew that the man before her felt it, and her heart was singing a savage song of triumph. She could wait. She had everything to gain and nothing to lose. She belonged to the pariah world of the Negro. Her love was patient, joyous, insistent, unconquerable.
It was unusually joyous to-night because she felt without words that the mad desires that burned a living fire in every nerve of her young body had scorched the man she had marked her own from the moment she had first laid eyes on his serious, aristocratic face—for back of every hysterical cry that came from her lips that night in the shadows beside old Peeler's house lay the sinister purpose of a mad love that had leaped full grown from the deeps of her powerful animal nature.
She paused in the doorway and softly said:
"Good night."
The tone of her voice was a caress and the bold eyes laughed a daring challenge straight into his.
He stared at her a moment, flushed, turned pale and answered in a strained voice: