THE LIFTING OF THE MASK

Out of a curious numbness that had almost been a swoon there came to her the consciousness of a hand that rapped and rapped and rapped upon the pane.  She had fled away to the farther end of the room in her panic.  She had turned the lamp low at the beginning of the storm, and now it burned so dimly that it scarcely gave out any light at all.  Beyond the window, the lightning flashed with an awful luridness upon the rushing hail.  Beyond the window, looking in upon her, and knocking, knocking, knocking, stood the figure of her dread.

She came to herself slowly, with a quaking heart.  It was more horrible to her than anything she had known since the days of her flight from the beleaguered fort; but she knew that she must fight down her horror, she knew as certainly as if a physical force compelled her that she would have to go to the window, would have to open to the man who waited there.

Slowly she brought her quivering body into subjection, while every nerve twitched and clamoured to escape.  Slowly she dragged herself back to the vision that had struck her with that paralysis of terror.  Resisting feebly, invisibly compelled, she went.

He ceased to knock, and, his face against the pane, he spoke imperatively.  What he said, she could not hear in that tumult of mighty sound.  Only she felt his insistence, answered to it, was mastered by it.

White-faced, with horror clutching at her heart, she undid the catch.  His one hand, strong, instinct with energy, helped her to raise the sash.  In a moment he was in the room, bare-headed, drenched from head to foot.

She fell back before him, but he scarcely looked at her.  He shut the window sharply, then strode to the lamp, and turned it up.  Then, abruptly he wheeled and spoke in a voice half-kindly, half-contemptuous.  “Muriel, you’re a little idiot!”

There was little in the words to comfort her, yet she was instantly and vastly reassured.  She was also for the moment overwhelmingly ashamed, but he did not give her time to think of that.

“I couldn’t get in any other way,” he said.  “I tried the doors first, hammered at them, but no one came.  Look here!  Olga is ill, very ill, and she wants you badly.  Are you brave enough to come?”

“Oh!” Muriel said, with a gasp.  “Now, do you mean?  With—­with you?”

He threw her an odd look under his flickering eyelids, and she noted with a scared minuteness of attention the gleam of the lamplight on their pale lashes.  She had always hated pale eyelashes.  They seemed to her untrustworthy.

“Yes,” he told her grimly.  “All alone—­with me—­in the storm.  Shall you be afraid—­if I give you my hand to hold?  You’ve done it before.”

Was he mocking her weakness?  She could not say.  She only knew that he watched her with the intensity of an eagle that marks its quarry.  He did not mean her to refuse.