"You sounded rather dreadful, Dick," she said; adding, after a hesitation, "Cruel—almost."
His face was set on the road ahead of him, and his profile, she thought, though not definitely vindictive in expression, was hard as stone.
"Cruel?" he asked.
"You said awful things in a very dreadful voice."
"The awful thoughts I had account for the voice, beloved," he explained. "They couldn't be said to him. I thought of his hands touching you—his voice speaking to you—you, young as an angel, as beautiful as the goddess that floated in upon the world in a mother-of-pearl dinghy! As clever as that other one with the fireman's tin hat, as game as Jimmy Wilde, and as kind as Heaven. Spoke to you—touched you—looked at you—blasphemy, profanation and sacrilege! And barged into your bedroom, when—. My God! woman," cried poor Dick, as if a flame came from the marble lips of him, "I could have watched him through an hour of rack and thumbscrew, when I thought of you up in that room of his. It's the cruelty I haven't done that's my claim to the next vacancy in halos. Cruel? Just for pouring down him a few tumblerfuls of a mixture of arrack and spud-spirit that he'd bought for his damned Caliban! And I only did that because there weren't any handcuffs handy."
Uttered in a voice wonderfully soft, yet vibrating with a quality which thrilled him like some tone of a celestial violin, her answering question reached him through the rush of their speed.
"Do you love me like that?" she asked.
To the short nod of his white silhouette he added curtly:
"Be quiet, please. I'm driving."
She chuckled softly to herself, thinking how well already she began to understand his ways—ways so odd and dear, she told herself, that never, she was sure, would she tire of them.