The lie irritated him. He raised his fist in a denunciatory gesture. With a cry of terror, like a snared rabbit's, she clapped her hands to her face and shrank, cowering, to the farther corner of the room.
“My God!” cried John, aghast at the realization of what had happened. “Did you think I was going to hit you?”
He stood staring at the little, undeveloped, rawboned, quivering creature. Her assumption of his right to strike her, of his capability of striking her, of the certainty that he would strike her, held him in amazed horror. The phantasmagorical to him was the normal to her. He had to wait a few moments before recovering command of his faculties. Then he went up to her.
“Unity, my dear—”
He put his arm about her, led her to his writing-chair, and kept his arm round her when he sat down.
“There, there, my child,” said he, clutching at her side nervously in his great grasp, “you misunderstood entirely.” In his own horrified dismay he had forgotten for the moment her wickedness. He could find no words save incoherences of reassurance. She made no response, but kept her hands before her face, her finger-tips pressed with little livid edges of flesh into her forehead. And thus for a long while they remained.
“I was n't going to punish you for breaking the figure,” he explained at last. “You did n't do it on purpose, did you?”
She shook her head.
“What made me angry was your telling me a lie; but I never dreamed of hurting you. I would sooner kill myself than hurt you,” he said, with a shudder. Then, with an intuition that came from the high gods, he added, “I would just as soon think of hurting Miss Stella, who gave me the little shepherd you broke.”
To John's amazement,—for what does a man know of female orphans, or of female anything, for the matter of that?—Unity tore herself away from him and, falling in a poor little lump on the floor, burst into a wild passion of tears and sobs. John, not knowing what else to do, stooped down and patted her shoulders in an aimless way. Then with a vague consciousness that she were best alone, he went softly out of the room.