As the cab started he looked over his shoulder at Anne through the front window. “Well worth trying,” he said to himself. “It’s the way to be even with her. And it’s the way to be free.”
They arrived at the cottage. Possibly, repose had restored Anne’s strength. Possibly, the sight of the place had roused the instinct of self-preservation in her at last. To Geoffrey’s surprise, she left the cab without assistance. When he opened the wooden gate, with his own key, she recoiled from it, and looked at him for the first time.
He pointed to the entrance.
“Go in,” he said.
“On what terms?” she asked, without stirring a step.
Geoffrey dismissed the cab; and sent the lad in, to wait for further orders. These things done, he answered her loudly and brutally the moment they were alone:
“On any terms I please.”
“Nothing will induce me,” she said, firmly, “to live with you as your wife. You may kill me—but you will never bend me to that.”
He advanced a step—opened his lips—and suddenly checked himself. He waited a while, turning something over in his mind. When he spoke again, it was with marked deliberation and constraint—with the air of a man who was repeating words put into his lips, or words prepared beforehand.
“I have something to tell you in the presence of witnesses,” he said. “I don’t ask you, or wish you, to see me in the cottage alone.”