The click of the door-handle roused Clarice.  She saw that the room was empty, and, drawing a breath of relief, started out of her chair.  Standing thus she heard Drake’s footsteps descending the stairs, and after a pause the slamming of the hall-door.  Then she went to the fireplace and knelt down close to it, warming her hands at the blaze.

‘The degradation of it!’ she whispered.

CHAPTER VII

Bit by bit she sought to reconstruct the scene, piecing it together out of Drake’s words; but somehow that scene would not be reconstructed.  She gradually found herself considering Drake’s words as a light thrown upon the man who spoke them, rather than as the description of an actual incident.  The humiliation which she experienced made her shrink with a certain repulsion from her recollections of Gorley and dwell instead upon the contrasting tones in Drake’s voice, the contrasting expressions upon his face when he spoke to her and when he merely narrated his story.  In the first instance gentleness had been the dominant characteristic, in the second indifference; and that very indifference, while it repelled her, magnetised her thoughts.

Something indeed of the same process which had caused that appearance of indifference in Drake was now repeating itself in Clarice.  Drake was superseding Gorley in her mind.  She struggled against the obsession and morbidly strove to picture to herself the actual execution:  the black troops ranged in a clearing before the smouldering village, looking up at one figure—­Gorley’s—­spinning on a rope.  But even upon that picture Drake’s face obtruded.  She thrust out her hands to keep it off, as though it was living and pressing in upon her; for a moment she tried to conjure up Gorley’s face, but it was blurred—­only his form she could see spinning on a rope, and Drake beneath it, his features clear like an intaglio and firm-set with that same sense of duty which had forced him sternly to recount to her the truth that afternoon.  She recurred to her recent habit of comparing him with Mallinson.  She had a vision of Mallinson, with the same experience to relate,—­if that were imaginable—­fidgeting through evasions, grasping at any diversion she might throw out for him to play with.

But what if Drake’s frankness, outspoken to the point of cruelty, sprang from an indifference to her?  Clarice had seen a good deal of Drake lately.  She caught herself almost smiling at the idea, softening at its palpable falsity.  In a last effort at resistance she fixed her thoughts on the cruelty, the callousness, in his method of narration, and began to feel herself on solid ground.  She was consequently inspired to run over all that he had said, in order to make her footing yet firmer, and at the outset she was brought to a check.  Why had she never questioned him upon the matter before? he had asked.  Clarice stopped and asked the question