your feet! But you can't deceive
me.--Do you think I don't know why you're stopping here?"
She looked away from him, without replying.
"Do you think I don't know why you've decked yourself out like this?"
"For God's sake stop harping on my dress!"
"Why you've bedizened yourself? ... why you were going out? ... why
you've spied and gaped eternally from one side of the street to the
other?"
As she only continued to look away, the desire seized him to say
something so incisive that the implacability of her face would have to
change, no matter to what. "I'll tell you then!" he shouted, and struck
the palm of one hand with the back of the other, so that the bones in
both bit and stung. "I'll tell you. You're waiting here ... waiting, I
say! But you'll wait to no purpose! For you've reckoned without me."
"Oh, very well, then, if it pleases you, I'm waiting! But you can at
least say for what? For you perhaps?--for you to regain your senses?"
"Stop your damned sneering! Will you tell me you don't know
who's--don't know he's here?"
Still she continued to overlook him. "He?--who?--what?" She flung the
little words at him like stones. Yet, in the second that elapsed before
his reply, a faint presentiment widened her eyes.
"You've got the audacity to ask that?" Flinging himself down on the
seat, he put his hands in his pockets, and stretched out his legs. "Who
but your precious Schilsky!--the man who knew how you ought to be
treated ... who gave you what you deserved!"
His first feeling was one of relief: the truth was out; there was an
end to the torture of the past hour. But after this one flash of
sensation, he ceased to consider himself. At his words Louise turned so
white that he thought she was going to faint. She raised her hand to
her throat, and held it there. She tried to say something, and could
not utter a sound. Her voice had left her. She turned her head and
looked at him, in a strange, apprehensive way, with the eyes of a
trapped animal.
"Eugen!--Eugen is here?" she said at last. "Here?--Do you know what
you're saying?" Now that her voice had come, it was a little thin
whisper, like the voice of a sick person. She pushed hat and hair, both
suddenly become an intolerable weight, back from her forehead.
Still he was not warned. "Will you swear to me you didn't know?"
"I know? I swear?" Her voice was still a mere echo of itself. But now
she rose, and standing at the end of the seat furthest
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