iting for him. She was dressed in black; and at once his
uplifting exultation was replaced by an awed and quivering patience
before her white face, before the immobility of her reposeful pose, the
more amazing to him who had encountered the strength of her limbs and
the indomitable spirit in her body. She had come out after Heyst's
departure, and had sat down under the portrait to wait for the return of
the man of violence and death. While lifting the curtain, she felt the
anguish of her disobedience to her lover, which was soothed by a feeling
she had known before--a gentle flood of penetrating sweetness. She
was not automatically obeying a momentary suggestion, she was under
influences more deliberate, more vague, and of greater potency. She had
been prompted, not by her will, but by a force that was outside of her
and more worthy. She reckoned upon nothing definite; she had calculated
nothing. She saw only her purpose of capturing death--savage, sudden,
irresponsible death, prowling round the man who possessed her, death
embodied in the knife ready to strike into his heart. No doubt it had
been a sin to throw herself into his arms. With that inspiration
that descends at times from above for the good or evil of our common
mediocrity, she had a sense of having been for him only a violent and
sincere choice of curiosity and pity--a thing that passes. She did not
know him. If he were to go away from her and disappear, she would utter
no reproach, she would not resent it; for she would hold in herself the
impress of something most rare and precious--his embraces made her own
by her courage in saving his life.

All she thought of--the essence of her tremors, her flushes of heat, and
her shudders of cold--was the question how to get hold of that knife,
the mark and sign of stalking death. A tremor of impatience to clutch
the frightful thing, glimpsed once and unforgettable, agitated her
hands.

The instinctive flinging forward of these hands stopped Ricardo dead
short between the door and her chair, with the ready obedience of a
conquered man who can bide his time. Her success disconcerted her. She
listened to the man's impassioned transports of terrible eulogy and even
more awful declarations of love. She was even able to meet his eyes,
oblique, apt to glide away, throwing feral gleams of desire.

"No!" he was saying, after a fiery outpouring of words in which the most
ferocious phrases of love were mingled with wooing a