“Very well.”
“In a minute.”
He struck a match and let it out.
“Do go now, there’s a good dog,” she said coaxingly.
He struck another match and held it head downwards.
“You needn’t hurry a feller.”
He tapped his cigarette gently on his knee, and applied the flame to it.
“That’s better.”
Lady Holme moved violently on the sofa. She had a pricking sensation all over her body, and her face felt suddenly very hot, as if she had fever. A ridiculous, but painful idea started up suddenly in her mind. Could Fritz suspect anything? Was he playing with her? She dismissed it at once as the distorted child of a guilty conscience. Fritz was not that sort of man. He might be a brute sometimes, but he was never a subtle brute. He blew two thin lines of smoke out through his nostrils, now with a sort of sensuous, almost languid, deliberation, and watched them fade away in the brilliantly-lit room. Lady Holme resolved to adopt another manner, more in accord with her condition of tense nervousness.
“When I ask you to do a thing, Fritz, you might have the decency to do it,” she said sharply. “You’re forgetting what’s due to me—to any woman.”