"I'll go when I've said what I'm going to say, and not before. I'm going to tell you the cold truth here and now. The Brooke farce is played out, we know each other, and you shall hear what I have to say! You—kissed—me to-day!—great God! do you suppose I don't know that you did?—and you did it because—"
Slight things decide momentous issues. Even then an appeal, the smallest sign of surrender on the girl's part, would have brought him crouching to her feet. But she flung back her head, and looked him in the eyes to show how little she feared him; and she laughed.
That let loose the tempest. All in a moment he broke off his husky, difficult words. All in a moment he had her by the waist, crushing her to him as if holding her against an army. There was no love in the fierce hold, only the determination that she should hear the cruel words that he spoke into her ear:
"Because you love me! Because you love me! Because you're mine—mine—mine!"
She disdained to struggle, as she disdained to plead. She made no effort to fling him off. Her silent, passive contempt brought him to himself in a flash.
The girl who, that golden afternoon had yielded to his spell, had weakened, had been as it were his to take, now lay like a lifeless thing in his ungentle hold. He realised what he had done.
When he let her go, she did, by an effort, stand alone. Her laugh of scorn was quenched. She lifted one hand to hide the quivering of her mouth, but did not move at once, perhaps because she feared to fall. He turned away from the still, silent, accusing figure with a kind of roar of helpless strength, of baffled will.
"The same, the same as ever," he said. "The woman's way! To make me feel a great, rough brute, when all the time it's you that are cruel. Yes! As cruel as a fiend."
To and fro he paced, to and fro upon the floor; then, with sense of defeat in overwhelming bitterness, got to his knees at her feet.
He knew that his fatal moment of uncontrolled temper had undone all that the past weeks had gained so painfully and slowly. Beneath his shame was an undercurrent of conviction that he was right and she wrong. But what was right or justice in face of Melicent's inflexibility?