Her lips moved but no words came. She gestured mutely—imploringly.
“Answer me, please.”
His implacable insistence whipped her into a sudden flare of defiance. She was like a cornered animal.
“Yes, then, if you must have it—I did know!” she flung at him in a low tone of furious anger.
Involuntarily he stepped back from her a pace, like a man suddenly smitten and stunned.
“While for me last night was sacred!” he muttered under his breath.
Before the utter scorn and repugnance in the low-breathed words her defiance crumbled to pieces.
“And for me, too! Eliot, I wasn’t pretending. I do love you. I never meant you to know, but last night—I couldn’t help it. I’d promised to marry the—the other man, and then you came, and we were alone—and—Oh!”—desperately, lifting a wrung face to his. “Why won’t you understand?”
But the beautiful, imploring face failed to move him one jot. Something had died suddenly within him—the something that was young and eager and blindly trusting. When she ceased speaking he was only conscious that he wanted to take her and break her between his two hands—destroy her as he had destroyed the letter she had written. The blood was drumming in his temples. His hands clenched and unclenched spasmodically. She was so slender a thing that it would be very easy ... very easy with those iron muscles of his.... And then she would be dead. She was so beautiful and so rotten at the core that she would be better dead....
It was only by a supreme effort that he mastered his overwhelming need of some physical outlet for the passion of disgust and anger which swept him bare of any gentler emotion as the incoming tide sweeps the shore bare of sign or footprint. His body grew taut and rigid with the pressure he was putting on himself. When at last he spoke his voice was almost unrecognisable.