all.

When the echo of it had died away the woman on the landing leaned over
the banister and called out bitterly to the man below "Don't you want to
come up and say good-bye." He had an impatient movement of the
shoulders and went on pacing to and fro as though he had not heard. But
suddenly he checked himself, stood still for a moment, then with a
gloomy face and without taking his hands out of his pockets ran smartly
up the stairs. Already facing the door she turned her head for a
whispered taunt: "Come! Confess you were dying to see her stupid little
face once more,"--to which he disdained to answer.

Flora de Barral, still seated before the table at which she had been
working on her sketch, raised her head at the noise of the opening door.
The invading manner of their entrance gave her the sense of something
she had never seen before. She knew them well. She knew the woman
better than she knew her father. There had been between them an
intimacy of relation as great as it can possibly be without the final
closeness of affection. The delightful Charley walked in, with his eyes
fixed on the back of her governess whose raised veil hid her forehead
like a brown band above the black line of the eyebrows. The girl was
astounded and alarmed by the altogether unknown expression in the
woman's face. The stress of passion often discloses an aspect of the
personality completely ignored till then by its closest intimates.
There was something like an emanation of evil from her eyes and from the
face of the other, who, exactly behind her and overtopping her by half a
head, kept his eyelids lowered in a sinister fashion--which in the poor
girl, reached, stirred, set free that faculty of unreasoning explosive
terror lying locked up at the bottom of all human hearts and of the
hearts of animals as well. With suddenly enlarged pupils and a movement
as instinctive almost as the bounding of a startled fawn, she jumped up
and found herself in the middle of the big room, exclaiming at those
amazing and familiar strangers.

"What do you want?"

You will note that she cried: What do you want? Not: What has happened?
She told Mrs Fyne that she had received suddenly the feeling of being
personally attacked. And that must have been very terrifying. The
woman before her had been the wisdom, the authority, the protection of
life, security embodied and visible and undisputed.

You may imagine then the force of the shock in th