! Like this! I had been
looking at the knife, and I thought I would come then if he wanted me so
much. Oh yes! I came--for the last time. . . . With the knife."

He was excessively terrified at her--the sister of the degenerate--a
degenerate herself of a murdering type . . . or else of the lying type.
Comrade Ossipon might have been said to be terrified scientifically in
addition to all other kinds of fear. It was an immeasurable and
composite funk, which from its very excess gave him in the dark a false
appearance of calm and thoughtful deliberation. For he moved and spoke
with difficulty, being as if half frozen in his will and mind--and no one
could see his ghastly face. He felt half dead.

He leaped a foot high. Unexpectedly Mrs Verloc had desecrated the
unbroken reserved decency of her home by a shrill and terrible shriek.

"Help, Tom! Save me. I won't be hanged!"

He rushed forward, groping for her mouth with a silencing hand, and the
shriek died out. But in his rush he had knocked her over. He felt her
now clinging round his legs, and his terror reached its culminating
point, became a sort of intoxication, entertained delusions, acquired the
characteristics of delirium tremens. He positively saw snakes now. He
saw the woman twined round him like a snake, not to be shaken off. She
was not deadly. She was death itself--the companion of life.

Mrs Verloc, as if relieved by the outburst, was very far from behaving
noisily now. She was pitiful.

"Tom, you can't throw me off now," she murmured from the floor. "Not
unless you crush my head under your heel. I won't leave you."

"Get up," said Ossipon.

His face was so pale as to be quite visible in the profound black
darkness of the shop; while Mrs Verloc, veiled, had no face, almost no
discernible form. The trembling of something small and white, a flower
in her hat, marked her place, her movements.

It rose in the blackness. She had got up from the floor, and Ossipon
regretted not having, run out at once into the street. But he perceived
easily that it would not do. It would not do. She would run after him.
She would pursue him shrieking till she sent every policeman within
hearing in chase. And then goodness only knew what she would say of him.
He was so frightened that for a moment the insane notion of strangling
her in the dark passed through his mind. And he became more frightened
than ever! She had him! He saw himself living in