"Well, we will say it is not devotion that inspires me, but a desire to get a bit of my own back," said he, with a most unpleasant smile. "She will be the Andromeda, sacrificed for the rest of you—offered to the Beast—myself. You flinched from such a fate. If she now undertakes to brave it, will not that be poetic justice?"
Mrs. Mynors swallowed once or twice, blinked, tried to visualise the impression this speech gave. Since his entrance, nothing that Gaunt said had sounded real. There had been a sarcasm, a jeering cadence; he had been playing with her all the time. But these words had a different ring. He was in earnest. It seemed as if the last sentence revealed to her something of his inner state of mind. It was like coming, in the dusk, upon the sudden mouth of a black pit. She had said, "You would torture Virginia!" and something in his reply suggested that her random words were true.
She sat staring, confronting the set mask of his face. The old fear of him came back, after twenty years, racing up across the vistas of memory as the Brittany tide races over the St. Malo sands. In this man there was something perverted, something evil, something with which she must hold no traffic, make no bargain. She knew that she ought to end this preposterous interview; to speak a few dignified reproachful words and leave the tempter and his monstrous proposal.
"Virginia," she managed at last to say, "shall never even know of your horrible suggestion."
He took his watch from his pocket, glanced at it, replaced it, and spoke.
"Then you reject this offer unconditionally?"
"As you foresaw that I should!" she cried, with a burst of tears hastily choked back.
"Oh, pardon me, I foresaw nothing of the kind. You forget that in old times I knew you rather well; and I never thought you a fool."
"But you are impossible—outrageous!" she expostulated. "Why should you want to marry Virginia?"
"I am old enough to know my own mind, I suppose. My reasons—pardon me—are not your concern. My terms are before you, and I am somewhat pressed for time. If you refuse tout court, there is nothing further to be said. I will take my leave. But it seems to me that you might submit the case to the judgment of Miss Mynors. Tell her that I have an estate in Derbyshire, and can settle five thousand pounds upon her, in addition to what I propose doing for her family. If she has anything like her mother's eye to the main chance, she will think twice before turning me down."