He took an excited turn up and down the room, then came back again to where she stood.
"Miss Nevill!" he cried, with rising anger, "you seem determined to wound my feelings and to insult my self-respect. You reject my offers, you sneer at my professions of affection; and now you appear to me to throw sinister doubts upon the meaning of the small thing I have asked you to do for me." At each of these accusations he waved his arm up and down to emphasize his remarks; and now, as if unconsciously, his hand suddenly fell upon the neck of one of the "Long Eliza" vases on the table before him. He lifted it up in the air.
"For Heaven's sake, Monsieur D'Arblet, take care—please put down that vase," cried Vera; suddenly returning to her former terrors.
He looked at the object in his hand as though it were utterly beneath consideration.
"Vase! what is a vase, I ask? Do you not suppose, before relinquishing what I ask of you, I would dash a hundred vases such as this into ten thousand fragments to the earth?" He raised his arm above his head as though on the point of carrying his threat into execution.
Vera uttered a scream.
"Good gracious! What on earth are you doing? It is Mrs. Hazeldine's favourite piece of china; she values it more than anything she has got. If you were to break it, she would go half out of her mind."
"Never mind this wretched vase. Answer me, Mademoiselle Nevill, will you give that parcel to Captain Kynaston?"
"I am not at all likely to meet him; I assure you nothing is so improbable. I know him very little. Ah! what are you doing?"
The infuriated Frenchman was whirling the blue-and-white treasure madly round in the air.