He looked at her unbelievingly and then fell back a pace or two. "My Lord! What's the matter with you?" he cried.
"I don't know," she muttered wildly. Her eyes still measured him, his bold, obvious good looks, his ruddy self-complacency, his habitual and shallow geniality, the satisfied vanity of a mouth steadily becoming looser; the depiction of years of self-indulgence in the little veins on his highly colored cheeks; the sagging lines of his well-set-up figure, ever taking on more flesh.
So she saw him, not perhaps as he was, but in the light of her own harsh and unmodified criticism, and mercilessly she reflected upon him all the scorn she felt for herself. She did not consider or even remember that with what strength of affection he possessed he had loved her; that, after his constitution he had given her of his best, all he had to give, in fact; that for her he had more than once faced danger, and just to see her again was even now facing it, fearlessly.
He had grown to expect from her an infinite variety of moods, but something in her pose, her expression, frightened him now. "Honey, what are you driving at?" he asked, a little tremulously, and stretched out his hand to lay it on her shoulder.
But again an oath whipped from her lips, her glance darkened. She drew back from him with the horse-shoe frown showing plainly on her forehead.
He looked at her, his whole face broken up, his mouth trembling, something like tears in his eyes. "Why, Pearl," he faltered, "ain't you glad to see me? Why, here I been waiting all these damned, dreary months, never thinking of any one but you, never even looking at another woman, just dreaming of the moment when I could put my arms around you again and know that you loved me and were mine."
A hard and bitter smile showed on her mouth. "Yours! Loved you!" she cried. "My God! You!"
Her unmistakable, unconcealed scorn was like a dagger thrust in the heart, and that stab of pain stirred his anger and restored him to himself. His face went almost purple, his cold eyes blazed. "Say," he cried roughly, "what are you driving at, anyway? Come down to cases now." He caught her by the wrist. "What did you let me come up here for? Just to make a monkey of me? Have you been treasuring spite against me all these months, and is this your way of getting even?"
She dragged her hand away from him and stepped back. "I let you come, if you want to know it, because I thought I was in love with you. Lord, think of it!" she laughed drearily. "I haven't fooled you any worse than I have myself."
He rubbed his hand across his eyes. "It ain't true," he said loudly, positively, defiantly.