“What do you want to see in me?” he asked, with a smile, looking steadily back again.

And now she turned aside her face once more, and once more the dusky colour came in her cheek.  He waited.

“Shall I go away?” he said at length.

“Would you rather?” she said, keeping her face averted.

“No,” he said.

Then again she was silent.

“Where shall I come to you?” he said.

She paused a moment still, then answered: 

“I’ll go to my room.”

“I don’t know which it is,” he said.

“I’ll show it you,” she said.

“And then I shall come to you in ten minutes.  In ten minutes,” he reiterated.

So she rose, and led the way out of the little salon.  He walked with her to the door of her room, bowed his head as she looked at him, holding the door handle; and then he turned and went back to the drawing-room, glancing at his watch.

In the drawing-room he stood quite still, with his feet apart, and waited.  He stood with his hands behind him, and his feet apart, quite motionless, planted and firm.  So the minutes went by unheeded.  He looked at his watch.  The ten minutes were just up.  He had heard footsteps and doors.  So he decided to give her another five minutes.  He wished to be quite sure that she had had her own time for her own movements.

Then at the end of the five minutes he went straight to her room, entered, and locked the door behind him.  She was lying in bed, with her back to him.

He found her strange, not as he had imagined her.  Not powerful, as he had imagined her.  Strange, in his arms she seemed almost small and childish, whilst in daily life she looked a full, womanly woman.  Strange, the naked way she clung to him!  Almost like a sister, a younger sister!  Or like a child!  It filled him with a curious wonder, almost a bewilderment.  In the dark sightlessness of passion, she seemed almost like a clinging child in his arms.  And yet like a child who in some deep and essential way mocked him.  In some strange and incomprehensible way, as a girl-child blindly obstinate in her deepest nature, she was against him.  He felt she was not his woman.  Through him went the feeling, “This is not my woman.”

When, after a long sleep, he awoke and came fully to himself, with that click of awakeness which is the end, the first shades were closing on the afternoon.  He got up and reached for his watch.

“Quarter past four,” he said.

Her eyes stretched wide with surprise as she looked at him.  But she said nothing.  The same strange and wide, perhaps insatiable child-like curiosity was in her eyes as she watched him.  He dressed very quickly.  And her eyes were wide, and she said no single word.

But when he was dressed, and bent over her to say goodbye, she put her arms round him, that seemed such frail and childish arms now, yet withal so deadly in power.  Her soft arms round his neck, her tangle of hair over his face.  And yet, even as he kissed her, he felt her deadly.  He wanted to be gone.  He wanted to get out of her arms and her clinging and her tangle of hair and her curiosity and her strange and hateful power.