hand on the handle, and felt the door come unlatched. Before
he pulled it open, he listened again to the silence. He felt it all
about him, complete, without a flaw.

The necessity of prudence had exasperated his self-restraint. A mood
of ferocity woke up in him, and, as always at such times, he became
physically aware of the sheeted knife strapped to his leg. He pulled at
the door with fierce curiosity. It came open without a squeak of hinge,
without a rustle, with no sound at all; and he found himself glaring at
the opaque surface of some rough blue stuff, like serge. A curtain was
fitted inside, heavy enough and long enough not to stir.

A curtain! This unforeseen veil, baffling his curiosity checked his
brusqueness. He did not fling it aside with an impatient movement; he
only looked at it closely, as if its texture had to be examined before
his hand could touch such stuff. In this interval of hesitation, he
seemed to detect a flaw in the perfection of the silence, the faintest
possible rustle, which his ears caught and instantly, in the effort of
conscious listening, lost again. No! Everything was still inside and
outside the house, only he had no longer the sense of being alone there.

When he put out his hand towards the motionless folds it was with
extreme caution, and merely to push the stuff aside a little, advancing
his head at the same time to peep within. A moment of complete
immobility ensued. Then, without anything else of him stirring,
Ricardo's head shrank back on his shoulders, his arm descended slowly to
his side. There was a woman in there. The very woman! Lighted dimly
by the reflection of the outer glare, she loomed up strangely big and
shadowy at the other end of the long, narrow room. With her back to
the door, she was doing her hair with bare arms uplifted. One of them
gleamed pearly white; the other detached its perfect form in black
against the unshuttered, uncurtained square window-hole. She was there,
her fingers busy with her dark hair, utterly unconscious, exposed and
defenceless--and tempting.

Ricardo drew back one foot and pressed his elbows close to his sides;
his chest started heaving convulsively as if he were wrestling or
running a race; his body began to sway gently back and forth. The
self-restraint was at an end: his psychology must have its way. The
instinct for the feral spring could no longer be denied. Ravish or
kill--it was all one to him, as long as by the act he libera