Then he smiled outright.
“I ain’t Billy the scorned no more, am I, my dear? Where’s your cheek, my lady?”
Mouse, bending over the tiara which she was building up, turned sick at his tone. She dared not resent it. She was vaguely but intensely alarmed, and she was aware that this man, so long her butt and jest, was her master.
He sat with his hands still on his knees and with a horrible leer on his dull eyes, gazing at her as a fox might look at a silver pheasant from which nothing divided him. He had always succeeded in everything, and now he had succeeded in getting quid pro quo for all he had endured and expended for her.
As far as his sluggish passions could be aroused they were excited for her; she had aroused in him one of those passions of mature years which are more slow yet more brutal than those of youth. But stronger still than this was his grim pleasure in her humiliation, in her silence, in her subserviency.
And what a fool she was, despite all her fine airs, and cool wit, and sovereign disdain!
He continued to gaze at her fixedly, the veins swelling like cords on his forehead, his stertorous breath as loud as the gasp of an engine, his small grey eyes grown red and shining luridly.
“My signature?” she repeated in an unsteady voice.
“You’ve got the jewels, my beauty. You can’t have no more.”
“Then it is not generosity!” said Mouse passionately, and very unwarily betraying her unfounded hopes.