The voices of both had sunk into absolute calm. The anxious servants in the kitchen concluded that the storm was over. ‘They’re talking as quiet as you and me,’ Nelly Spence said, with a sigh of relief, as she came back from an anxious vigil at the door. While the husband stood by his wife’s chair, with his hand on her shoulder, speaking to her in a voice as quiet and subdued as if the words had been the tenderest words of love.
‘It is well you should know what you have to expect,’ he said. ‘Submit, and I will forgive all this, and take you back to my heart. Shudder if you please, but my arms are the only ones open to you now; I will take you back, notwithstanding that you mean to betray me; but if you keep your own way, Isabel, understand that I will crush you like a fly.’
She kept looking at him, undaunted, not moving a hair-breadth back, nor changing her position. Her shrinking youth, her womanly tremor, all extinguished in an emergency more terrible than any death.
‘Would I care?’ she said softly, as if to herself; ‘now that life itself is dead and gone? You cannot frighten me now.’
‘Like a fly!’ he repeated, as if he liked the image, closing his hand as if upon it; ‘you, and that child you make your idol. Ah, I touch you now!’
‘She is safe out of your reach,’ said Isabel, though not without a tremble. And he, too, started slightly. The duel was to the death, and his opponent was unencumbered, free to beard him to the last extremity.
‘What do you want?’ he asked abruptly, seating himself in front of her. ‘In all this I suppose you mean something. What do you want of me now?’
Then it rushed upon Isabel in a moment what she ought to say.
‘You are in danger,’ she said; ‘you were seen that night. At any moment they might remember it was you. And I know. And never more—never, never more can you and me be as we have been. Never more! Sooner, I would die!’
The shudder in her voice thrilled him with wild irritation; but he gave no sign of it, waiting for what she had to say.