His strong young arms were like a vise, his eyes were brilliant, pleading for him.
"Fantine...?" he breathed.
"No! no!" She forced him back with all her strength, aware of his sudden loss of control, but perfect mistress of herself. Her hands, pressed against his chest, checked him for a fleeting moment. Within his coat that the struggle forced open, her eyes detected a note of white—the corner of an envelope, and in a flash her fingers sought and found the letter, purloining it.
She heard him give a little gasp, incredulous and vexed at once; his arms relaxed, the spell snapped, and twisting sidewards she slipped away out of his reach, breathless, triumphant.
Little she guessed what the trick cost her! For McTaggart in common with his kind was scrupulous toward correspondence. Nothing on earth would have induced him to trifle with another's letters.
And now as Fantine stood before him with a mocking smile, and in her grasp an envelope with his name upon it, in Jill's childish scrawling hand, it added the last fatal spark to resentment caused by baffled desire.
"That's mine, I think." His husky voice, almost rude in his sudden anger, proved to the woman she had found the right excuse to delay her surrender.
"Ah non, mon cher Pierrot!—I think I will keep your ... lettre d'amour. I'm very, ver-ry cross with you..." But her eyes belied the implied reproof. She stepped back, and the glow from the fire fell on her flushed and mischievous face, on the crumpled transparent peignoir that had fallen away from one bare shoulder.
And suddenly it came to McTaggart what she was ... and his own folly!
He saw that passion swayed him alone without the redeeming touch of love.