“Fectnor!” she cried, standing tense and white before him, “I think you’re all brute—just common, hopeless brute.”
He became perfectly serious; but presently he regarded her with a flicker of humor in his eyes, she thought. “You didn’t say that as if you meant it, Sylvia,” he declared. “You didn’t say it as if you quite believed it. But I’m going to show you that you’re right. What we’ve been together, Sylvia, you and I, we’re going to continue to be until we both agree to quit. That’s what you may call justice. And so far I’m not agreeing to quit.”
He came toward her then, and she perceived that his bearing had altered completely. He seemed moved by some impulse stronger than himself—as if it were quite outside himself.
She felt that her heart had suddenly ceased to beat. A leopard crouching before her on a limb could not have seemed more pitiless, more terrible. She had sprung to the door opening into her father’s room before he could reach her. Her fingers shot the bolt and the door was open. And then she knew she had made a fatal mistake in holding that long and quiet parley with the beast that had trapped her. She had led her father, doubtless, to believe that it was an amicable talk that had been going on behind the closed door. She knew now that at the first instant of Fectnor’s appearance she should have given battle and cried for help.
Now, looking into the adjoining room, while Fectnor’s grip closed upon her wrist, she saw the front door quietly close. Her father had gone out.
CHAPTER XIV
Sylvia climbed the hill in the dusk.
A casual observer would have remarked that all was not right with her. Beneath a calm exterior something brooded. You might have supposed that some of the trivial things of existence had gone wrong: that a favorite servant had left her, or that the dressmaker had failed to keep an appointment. Sylvia was not an unschooled creature who would let down the scroll of her life’s story to be read by every idle eye.
But the gods of the desert, if any such there be—the spirit of the yucca and the cactus and the sage—must have known by the lines of that immobile face, by the unseeing stare in those weary eyes, that some fundamental change had come over the woman who passed along that road. Sylvia had seemed almost like a happy child when she descended the hill an hour before. It was a woman who fashioned a new philosophy of life who now returned.
It was her own father who had bade her come; it was the man she loved—for whom she had meant to create her life anew—who had bade her go; and it was one to whom she had never told an untruth, for whose pleasure she had been beautiful and gay, who had destroyed her.