“Do you rally me?” he demanded, letting through a flash of the anger that was mounting in him. “Am I so poor a thing that you whet your little wit upon me?”
“My lord, you are paining me. What can you look to gain by this? Suffer me to go.”
A moment yet he stood, holding her wrists and looking down into her eyes with a mixture of pleading and ferocity in his. Then he made a sound in his throat, and caught her bodily to him; his arms, laced about her, held her bound and crushed against him. His dark, flushed face hovered above her own.
Fear took her at last. It mounted and grew to horror. “Let me go, my lord,” she besought him, her voice trembling. “Oh, let me go!”
“I love you, Hortensia! I need you!” he cried, as if wrung by pain, and then hot upon her brow and cheeks and lips his kisses fell, and shame turned her to fire from head to foot as she fought helplessly within his crushing grasp.
“You dog!” she panted, and writhing harder, wrenched free a hand and arm. Blindly she beat upwards into that evil satyr's face. “You beast! You toad! You coward!”
They fell apart, each panting; she leaning faint against the spinet, her bosom galloping; he muttering oaths decent and other—for in the upward thrusting of her little hand one of its fingers had prodded at an eye, and the pain of it—which had caused him to relax his hold of her—stripped what little veneer remained upon the man's true nature.
“Will you go?” she asked him furiously, outraged by the vileness of his ravings. “Will you go, or must I summon help?”
He stood looking at her, straightening his wig, which had become disarranged in the struggle, and forcing himself to an outward calm. “So,” he said. “You scorn me? You will not marry me? You realise the chance, eh? And why? Why?”
“I suppose it is because I am blind to the honor of the alliance,” she controlled herself to answer him. “Will you go?”