Fascinated, she watched him at his ablutions where he squatted by the water's edge, scrubbing away as industriously as a washer-racoon. It did not occur to her to flee; curiosity dominated—an overpowering desire to see what he really resembled in puris naturalibus.
After a while he stood up, hurled the damp wig into the woods, wiped his hands on his knickerbockers and his face on his sleeve, and, bending over, examined his collapsed calves.
And all the while, as the fumes of the chloroform disappeared and he began to realise what had been done to him, he was becoming madder and madder.
She recognised the wrath in his face as he swung on his heel and came toward her.
"It is your own fault!" she said, resolutely, "for playing a silly trick like——" But she observed his advance very dubiously, straightening up to her full slender height to confront him, but not rising to her feet. Her knees were still very shaky.
He halted close in front of her. Something in the interrogative yet fearless beauty of her upward gaze checked the torrent of indignant eloquence under which he was labouring, and, presently, left him even mentally mute, his lips parted stupidly.
She said: "According to the old order of things a well-bred man would ask my pardon. But a decently-bred man, in the first place, wouldn't have done such a thing to me. So your apology would only be a paradox——"
"What!" he exclaimed, stung into protest. "Am I to understand that after netting me and chloroforming me and nearly drowning me——"
"My mistake was perfectly natural. Do you suppose that I would even dream of trailing you as you really are?"
He gazed at her bewildered; passed his unsteady hand over his countenance, then sat down abruptly beside her on the mossy log and buried his head in his hands.
