“You mean you want us to get out too?” Uncle Henry asked, indignation in his high voice.

“That’s exactly what I do mean,” Morgan Pell stated, firmly.  “And the sooner the better.”

The situation, he felt, was entirely in his hands.

“Oh, very well!” Uncle Henry replied.  He pushed his chair toward the door, murmuring as he went, “Thank God I ain’t his wife!  That’s all I got to say!”

Hardy was still standing in the shadows.  He looked at “Red.”  “What’s he going to do?” meaning Pell.

“I don’t know.  I—­” the foreman answered.  Angela, frightened, followed the husky “Red” through the door; and the husband and wife were left entirely alone.

There was a pregnant silence.  Terror came into Lucia’s heart.  Her brain reeled.  She had seen Morgan in a temper before—­many times; but never with quite this sinister light in his eyes, this tense, quiet force behind his slightest gesture.  What was he going to say to her?  She felt like an animal at bay.  She determined that she would gain one advantage by making him be the first to speak.  But as he approached her slowly, fear seized her.  He seemed no longer a man, just a hulking giant—­a brutal, frenzied creature; and something quite apart from herself caused her to cry out: 

“What are you going to do?” Oddly there flashed into her mind that very line, and she wondered where she had heard it.  Yes, even in her terror, her abject fear, she remembered.  It was once when, as a child, she had seen a dramatization of “Oliver Twist.”  Bill Sykes came toward Nancy, just as Morgan was coming toward her now, with leering countenance, and the poor wretch had screamed out:  “What are you going to do?” That scene was forever photographed on her brain, and now, from some strange recess, Nancy’s pitiful words came back to her.

He did not answer.  Another step, and he would be upon her.

“What is it, Morgan?  Oh, what is it?” She shrunk back, slowly.  If he touched her ...

But he did not lift his hand, as she fully expected him to do.  Instead, he uttered only two words.  They were a command.

“Kiss me!”

Almost she would rather have felt his blows raining on her head.

“What?” she cried, a new amazement within her.

He glared down at her.  His breath was on her cheek.

“You heard,” he stated.  And he stood stock still.

Frightened beyond believing or seeing, she offered her cheek to him.  “But I—­” she managed to get out.

Pell saw that she was shrinking away again; she could not bring herself to do as he willed.

“So!” her husband cried, significantly.  Now she realized, in a blinding flash, the cruel subtlety behind his test of her.  Her head went back; she closed her eyes.  And then—­how she did it she never knew—­she raised her mouth.

“I don’t want to kiss you.”  It was the refinement of cruelty.  “I want you to kiss me.  Do it!” His hands were behind his back.  He stood straight and stiff as an Indian chief.