The other added, “He is young and strong.  There are kisses for us all.”

I lay quiet, looking out from under my eyelashes in an agony of delightful anticipation.  The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement of her breath upon me.  Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood.

I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes.  The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating.  There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth.  Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed to fasten on my throat.  Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and I could feel the hot breath on my neck.  Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one’s flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer, nearer.  I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there.  I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited, waited with beating heart.

But at that instant, another sensation swept through me as quick as lightning.  I was conscious of the presence of the Count, and of his being as if lapped in a storm of fury.  As my eyes opened involuntarily I saw his strong hand grasp the slender neck of the fair woman and with giant’s power draw it back, the blue eyes transformed with fury, the white teeth champing with rage, and the fair cheeks blazing red with passion.  But the Count!  Never did I imagine such wrath and fury, even to the demons of the pit.  His eyes were positively blazing.  The red light in them was lurid, as if the flames of hell fire blazed behind them.  His face was deathly pale, and the lines of it were hard like drawn wires.  The thick eyebrows that met over the nose now seemed like a heaving bar of white-hot metal.  With a fierce sweep of his arm, he hurled the woman from him, and then motioned to the others, as though he were beating them back.  It was the same imperious gesture that I had seen used to the wolves.  In a voice which, though low and almost in a whisper seemed to cut through the air and then ring in the room he said,

“How dare you touch him, any of you?  How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it?  Back, I tell you all!  This man belongs to me!  Beware how you meddle with him, or you’ll have to deal with me.”

The fair girl, with a laugh of ribald coquetry, turned to answer him.  “You yourself never loved.  You never love!” On this the other women joined, and such a mirthless, hard, soulless laughter rang through the room that it almost made me faint to hear.  It seemed like the pleasure of fiends.