“If you think there is any misapprehension,” she said, now cold again; “there is none on my part.”
“I think there is,” he rejoined significantly.
“No,” she maintained scornfully. “I can reckon you up, Mr. Playford. I am sorry you should have thought proper to come here to threaten me.”
“Have I?” he broke in protestingly. “Have I threatened you?”
“If not,” she answered, “I confess I do not see the drift of what you have said.”
“In my own justification, let me tell you,” he urged. “Please.”
Alexia resumed her seat with a significant glance at the clock. “I hope it will not take you very long.”
How he hated her, this scornful, imperious beauty, who was meeting his attack so skilfully; hated her for her contempt and rejection of him, yet loved her with a fierceness and pervasiveness which he was, with all his self-control, unable to subdue; while he hated and cursed the bands of the passion that encompassed him.
“I certainly did not come here to threaten you, Countess,” he began, in a tone schooled almost to apology. “I should hardly have brought myself to repay your graciousness in receiving me by an action so ill as that. I have simply come here, led, driven by an impulse which you forbid me to name, to make a proposition to you, or, if you prefer the word, a bargain with you.”
Lying back in her low chair, her eyes fixed almost dreamily upon the little gold pencil-case which she lazily pushed in and out, she just lifted them for an instant to Playford’s face, then lowered them again. But from the light of that instant’s glance he saw no encouragement.