"I know why you have come, Philip," she says calmly, and it seems that she has lived through this moment in some past existence, so painfully familiar are the ghastly occurrences of to-night. Perhaps it was in some shadowy dream which faded from her memory on awaking. "I know why you are here," she repeats throwing back her head against the bamboo panelling, and stretching out her arms in the attitude of a crucified victim. "I read it in your face. But I am too young to die, too sin-stained."
"You think I have come to kill you, Eleanor?"
His words are low and hollow; they seem strangely similar to the warning growl of his huge dog. She thinks he has grown to resemble the ferocious-looking beast, or "Help," in the moonlight, appears like his master—from perpetual companionship.
But even as she looks, something of the man creeps into Philip's eyes, humanising them. The brute nature fades.
She answers his question under her breath:
"Yes, you have hunted me down to take my life."
An expression of intense pain contracts his features; she has cut him to the quick.
With a woman's sharp instinct, intensified by dread, Eleanor sees that her doom is not yet; but the thought of another burns like fire in her brain. Her own miserable thread of life, what does it matter? She holds it as nought compared with the one she loves. She would die a thousand deaths if such a sacrifice would buy him safety.
"How little you understand me!" he says at last. "It was always so."
"Why have you come?" she asks, faintly tracing the shadows that fall around him in the pallid moonlight.