“I’ll have that man’s name first!”
The girl laughed in his distorted face. He was within an ace of shooting her—of firing point-blank into the lovely, flushed features, merely to shatter them, destroy, annihilate. He had the desire to do it. But her breathless, contemptuous laugh broke that impulse—relaxed it, leaving it flaccid. And after an interval something else intervened to stay his hand at the trigger—something that crept into his mind; something he had begun to suspect that she knew. Suddenly he became convinced that she did know it—that she believed that he dared not kill her and stand the investigation of a public trial before a juge d’instruction—that he could not afford to have his own personal affairs scrutinised too closely.
He still wanted to kill her—shoot her there where she sat in bed, watching him out of scornful young eyes. So intense was his need to slay—to disfigure, brutalise this girl who had mocked him, that the raging desire hurt him physically. He leaned back, resting against the silken wall, momentarily weakened by the violence of passion. But his pistol still threatened her.
No; he dared not. There was a better, surer way to utterly destroy her,—a way he had long ago prepared,—not expecting any such contingency as this, but merely as a matter of self-insurance.
His levelled weapon wavered, dropped, held loosely now. He still glared at her out of pallid and blood-shot eyes in silence. After a while:
“You hell-cat,” he said slowly and distinctly. “Who is your English lover? Tell me his name or I’ll beat your face to a pulp!”
“I have no English lover.”
“Do you think,” he went on heavily, disregarding her reply, “that I don’t know why you chose an Englishman? 34 You thought you could blackmail me, didn’t you?”
“How?” she demanded wearily.