"I considered it my duty," he returned. "I laid your Bible on them to show you what actuated me."
Then he had done it! This was the man who had torn to pieces that fabric of beauty she had built up with such tender, adoring care, into which she had woven so many hopes.
A gust of fury enveloped her, so that she shook from head to foot. The lust to kill, to murder him, rushed upon her like a great beast and gripped her, shook her in its teeth, till all grew black and red before her. She gripped the mahogany chair back, by which she stood, till the knuckles started out on the back of her hands, white and shining.
But the instinct of her strong mentality was to elucidate the mystery, to search out the clue to this bewildering act, that she could not in the least understand.
"Why did you do it?" she asked.
The Rector unconsciously bent under the penetrating will of the query.
"Because they were improper—most improper pictures to have in a clergyman's house."
"Improper?" Regina stared at him in a blank amaze that for the moment eclipsed the welling tide of passion. Had her father suddenly become mad? Was that the solution of the mystery? She had yet to realise that there is no madness so blinding, so deadly, so destructive, as the craze of the impure mind against all artistic creations.
"They were landscapes, sunsets ... the most beautiful things I could find ... the skies, the effects of light.... What do you mean?" she continued, and again the Rector felt compelled to stand her cross-examination and reply.
That same primitive impulse of self-preservation that had stirred within him at his daughter's approach warned him now, without his thinking about it, that his sole safety lay in the defence and explanation, such as it was, that he had to make.