only the tips of her toes, with little pink nails like those of an infant, were left visible.  Having drawn from underneath the dressing-gown a mass of hair which had been imprisoned by it, she crossed behind the couch to the end of the room, and placed her ear to the painted mirror, which was, apparently, a door.  Tapping the glass with her finger, she called, “Is any one there?  Lord David?  Are you come already?  What time is it then?  Is that you, Barkilphedro?” She turned from the glass.  “No! it was not there.  Is there any one in the bathroom?  Will you answer?  Of course not.  No one could come that way.”

Going to the silver lace curtain, she raised it with her foot, thrust it aside with her shoulder, and entered the marble room.  An agonized numbness fell upon Gwynplaine.  No possibility of concealment.  It was too late to fly.  Moreover, he was no longer equal to the exertion.  He wished that the earth might open and swallow him up.  Anything to hide him.

She saw him.  She stared, immensely astonished, but without the slightest nervousness.  Then, in a tone of mingled pleasure and contempt, she said, “Why, it is Gwynplaine!” Suddenly with a rapid spring, for this cat was a panther, she flung herself on his neck.

Suddenly, pushing him back, and holding him by both shoulders with her small claw-like hands, she stood up face to face with him, and began to gaze at him with a strange expression.

It was a fatal glance she gave him with her Aldebaran-like eyes—­a glance at once equivocal and starlike.  Gwynplaine watched the blue eye and the black eye, distracted by the double ray of heaven and of hell that shone in the orbs thus fixed on him.  The man and the woman threw a malign dazzling reflection one on the other.  Both were fascinated—­he by her beauty, she by his deformity.  Both were in a measure awe-stricken.  Pressed down, as by an overwhelming weight, he was speechless.

“Oh!” she cried.  “How clever you are!  You are come.  You found out that I was obliged to leave London.  You followed me.  That was right.  Your being here proves you to be a wonder.”

The simultaneous return of self-possession acts like a flash of lightning.  Gwynplaine, indistinctly warned by a vague, rude, but honest misgiving, drew back, but the pink nails clung to his shoulders and restrained him.  Some inexorable power proclaimed its sway over him.  He himself, a wild beast, was caged in a wild beast’s den.  She continued, “Anne, the fool—­you know whom I mean—­the queen—­ordered me to Windsor without giving any reason.  When I arrived she was closeted with her idiot of a Chancellor.  But how did you contrive to obtain access to me?  That’s what I call being a man.  Obstacles, indeed! there are no such things.  You come at a call.  You found things out.  My name, the Duchess Josiana, you knew, I fancy.  Who was it brought you in?  No doubt it was the page.  Oh, he is clever!  I will give him a hundred guineas.  Which way did you