Erect there, breathing hard, her eyes flaming, she flung her words angrily at the tall loose-limbed figure of her captor.
“Sir,” she said, “you will let me depart at once, or you shall pay dearly for this villainy.”
He closed the door and turned again, to face her. He attempted to smother in a smile the hangdog expression of his countenance.
“Unless you suffer me to depart at once, you shall....”
There she paused. Abruptly she broke off, to lean forward a little, staring at him, her parted lips and dilating eyes bearing witness to an amazement so overwhelming that it overrode both her anger and her fear. Hoarse and tense came her voice at last:
“Who are you? What ... what is your name?”
He stared in his turn, checking in the very act of mopping his brow, wondering what it was she saw in him to be moving her so oddly. Where she stood, her face was more than half in shadow, whilst the light of that cluster of candles on the table was beating fully upon his own. He was still considering how he should answer her, what name assume, when she startled him by sparing his invention further trouble in the matter.
“You are Randal Holles!” she cried on a wild, strained note.
He advanced a step in a sort of consternation, breathless, some sudden ghastly emotion tearing at his heart, eyeing her wildly, his jaw fallen, his whole face livid as a dead man’s.
“Randal Holles!” she repeated in that curiously tortured voice. “You! You of all men—and to do this thing!”