She looked at the moon and at the ground and all about, but remained mute and apparently pondering.
He had forgotten Jack now as well as the cigarette, and was rapidly losing the remembrance that this was to be merely a scientific experiment.
"Your silence makes me all the more impatient. I will know now. Do you like to be here, Nina?"
A new earnestness in his tone thrilled her and made her tremble. She turned with a sudden impulse, as if something had made her reckless:
"You are forcing me to answer you," she said vehemently, as she looked at him with a constrained, though affectionate expression in her eyes. "But I will tell you if I die for it. Oh, I am so wicked to say so, but I must. You make me. Oh, now let us go into the house."
Geoffrey's generous intention to act rightly by Jack departed from him, and for a moment he drew her toward him, saying that she must not care too much for being there, "because, you know," he said, "this is only a little flirtation, and is quite too good to last."
She seemed not to be listening to him, but to be thinking; and after a moment she said, in long drawn out, sorrowful accents:
"Oh—poor—Jack!"
Something in the slow, melancholy way she said this, and the thought of the poor place that Jack certainly held at the present time in her affections, struck Geoffrey as irresistibly amusing, and he laughed aloud in an unsympathetic way, which presented him to her in a new light, and she sprang from him at once. Her emotion turned to anger as she thought that the laugh had been derisive, and her blood boiled to think he could bring her here to laugh at her after he had succeeded in winning her so completely.
"Come into the house at once," she cried. "I can't go in alone even if I knew the way."