Against the rock of this unanswerable logic her rhetoric had for one hundred and eighty minutes broken in vain. There was not a single weapon in her not ill-furnished armoury that she had not employed; and all with a like result. “Wounded honour?” His family en bloc or severally should follow her round the room on their knees, imploring her pardon, and eating their words. “Tears?” He beat her hollow at them. “A vow never to love any one else?” This in her present nausea of endearments seemed a vow easy indeed to keep, but it was received with frenzy at the mere suggestion of such a possibility. The offer to be a sister to him and to be god-daughter to his eldest child when he was happily married to some one else were not up to her usual level of cleverness, and would not have been put forward had her mind been in its normal condition. Their effect was terrifying!
Physically exhausted, she leaned back in her chair, quite at her wits’ end, mechanically stroking with some dim hope of keeping it quiet the distraught head which, rolling about in sandy abandonment on her lap, pinned her to her seat. Never did a more poignant regret at the success of its own handiwork fill a human mind. “I ought to have known more about him before I went in for him so thoroughly, but who would have guessed that under that stodgy outside there was anything like this?”
Another hour had passed, and yet another, and still the situation remained at the same hopeless deadlock. Occasionally the head lifted itself and the mouth repeated its pitiful parrot cry, and once, twice, thrice again, Miss Ransome went through the weapons of her armoury. In her desperation she tried a new one; offered—in utter hopelessness of ever ridding herself of him on cheaper terms—a compromise. If he would go away for a year, round the world—every one went round the world nowadays—in a year she might be cleared and made more worthy of him; and at the end——
He interrupted her with the brutal directness of one who had got through the civilized surface of things to the bed-rock of mere Nature, while a sort of cunning flashed into his dimmed and bloodshot eyes.
“I should find you waiting for me?”
“That you undoubtedly would not!” was the reply made by herself to herself, but for him there was a little tired sigh, and an “Ah! if you cannot trust me——”
At that he went off into extravagances, incoherent assertions of the impossibility of any one seeing without longing to possess her; of the madness of leaving her as a mark for other men’s desires.
She collapsed into silence. “Will no one ever arrive to rescue me?” The answer seemed to come in a loud whirring familiar sound, the prosaic boom of the gong.
“It is luncheon!” she cried. “You must not keep me!”
“You can think of luncheon now!”