He caught her hands, and, without roughness but with his young strength, removed them. She let them fall at her side.
“I'm not going to wait much longer on you,” he said.
“You're hard as nails, Rocky.” Her underlip was quivering; her pale eyes were a little darker, and seemed full of feeling. She turned suddenly to the rough bed, and reached under the cover for her shopping bag. Hiding it from him with her body, she opened it and took out the triangular bottle; then lingered an instant to look at the clasps of the pearl cape that were set with large, perfectly cut diamonds. There were five of the clasps, and perhaps fifty of the sparkling, glittering stones. In value they would vary somewhat-: but in themselves, even without the pearls, they represented a fortune. She quietly closed the bag and replaced it under the covers.
With the rough-edged little bottle in her hand she faced him.
“I knew a girl,” she said, with a far-away look in her eyes, “who took five of these tablets and then lived two days. She suffered terribly, of....”
He caught the bottle from her hand and threw it against the wall, where it broke. The green pills rolled about the floor.
“Oh, well,” she remarked—“I can take them after you've gone.”
“After I've gone you can do as you think best.”
“But something will have to be done about me. Rocky. You'll have to get me ashore. And see about burying me.... And you'll have to explain me.”
This moved him not at all. Apparently he was to be one of the Kanes—strong, pitiless, destined for success and power. There would be weak moments; but all that her uncannily shrewd eyes saw in him. For that matter, Miss Carmichael had known many men of the sort that in America are termed “big”—certain of them with an unpleasant secret intimacy—and each had possessed and (at moments) been possessed by strong passions. It had never been wholly a matter of what is called brain; always there had been emotional force, with a dark side as well as a bright.