Just then there is a movement in one of the clumps of weed. The dusky-hued perch with the high back forestalls her. Right before her nose he darts like an arrow after the fugitive, but hesitates at the very moment of striking, stops, and sniffs.
“Oh! so he daren’t! He wants to have the whole company with him!”
Grim’s eyes are alight with the eagerness of the hunter, and her stiff tongue quivers in her mouth as, with widely opened jaws, she springs upon her prey.
The roach is good enough! It wriggles between her teeth and tickles her cheeks and chin with slaps of its little tail; and yet ... it has an inexplicable strength like that of a little pearly fish that she dimly remembers.
She grows angry. Is an insignificant little fish like this going to resist her will? The silly little thing is ready to go any way but the one she wants it to go; she can hardly get from one thicket of weeds to the other. She becomes so angry that she feels the blood burning in the back of her neck, and with a sudden vigorous effort, she gives the roach a violent tug.
That helps; the fish becomes manageable, its strength vanishes. She is triumphant. Yes, she knew, of course, how it would be!
Grim had been fortunate in her misadventure. True, it was a man-roach that she had bitten into, but she had fortunately broken the line, and now went off with a long trace dragging after her. She had swallowed the bait, but what made her horribly uncomfortable was that in doing so she had got a long, thorny water-plant fixed to her upper lip.
They were the barbs of the triple hook that she took for thorns!
At that moment she sees another little roach shining. It is just as languid as the previous one, and makes the same tempting impression. Instantly she makes a dash at it.
The same comedy was gone through, the same incomprehensible strength in a puny roach, and the same work to get the refractory fish into her power.