“Be sensible,” he entreated. “Why will you not hear me?”
If the brute in his nature was, from an ominous light in his eyes, on the point of asserting itself, the temper in Ruperta’s was now fairly roused.
“Hear you!” she echoed, her indignation flashing out, “I have heard—from you—of your nobility of character, and you now seem bent upon giving me an illustration of it.”
“If you make me beside myself with love and your coldness,” he urged.
“Love?” she repeated scornfully. Then, regarding her persecutor with abhorrent eyes, his power of will and action, his unscrupulousness and cunning of purpose and, consequently, her own helplessness came home to her. But this acute realization of her desperate position brought with it in a flash the idea of an expedient. To oppose her courage to this man’s strength was hopeless, but, in her extremity, she remembered her trick of temporizing with Udo Rollmar. Wit might succeed where mere spirit failed. True, her former experiment had not been altogether successful, it had led to a passage which was unpleasant enough, but it had at least shown her, what she had sometimes heard, that man is most gullible when his heart or his passion is touched. This man’s mind was, as it were, a very citadel of cunning behind the outer fortification of his brute strength; but Udo Rollmar was astute, too, in an objectionable degree, and she had, at any rate for the moment, fooled him. The idea of stooping to duplicity was to a girl of Ruperta’s proud spirit utterly repugnant; but if ever subterfuge was justifiable it was so in her case, in this crisis as she stood there helpless, desperate, at the mercy of a man who clearly knew none where his own selfish will was concerned.
“You talk of love,” she said, with a little softening of the scorn in her eyes. “What can you expect me to understand by that?”
“Nothing,” he answered readily, and perhaps, for the moment, sincerely, “but what is due to your position, to your honour and mine.”
She laughed with a touch of satire that was yet provocatively fascinating. “One might easily doubt your honourable intentions, Count Irromar, from the manner of your wooing.”
Perhaps the success, which was more familiar to him than failure, gave him the cue that he was gaining ground, and shut his eyes to the idea that this royally masterful girl could yoke her pride with deceit.
“I would I might dare hope,” he said, caressingly confident, “that in your eyes impetuosity may be my greatest fault.”