Then he waited for her, with a face like a rat.
XI
She might have gathered warning from Minnie's panting summons, but had been busy over her accounts and had noticed nothing amiss.
“He wants you, Miss Percival! Don't go!” She had scarcely heard. She said, “Who wants me? Mr. Ingram? I'll come;” and though the maid stammered, “I wouldn't, oh, I wouldn't,” had gone.
The face he showed her from his bureau, where he sat huddled over a litter of papers, prepared her instantly for crisis; snarling, white and wicked, yet it had tragedy in it—as if he knew that he had himself to reckon with beyond all.
For some time he seemed not to see her, though he looked at her. He sat glooming, like a man dumb in high fever, working his lower jaw, screwing and unscrewing his hands. Afterwards she believed that he had been groping for the cruellest thing he could say, and was goaded into what he did say by the sense that he could find nothing.
“So that was your work? Your choice way! To set one of my own servants to club me.”
She looked at him blankly; but her face glowed with sudden fire. “I haven't the least notion what you mean. Who has clubbed you?”