shmael,
the younger brother who had dispossessed him of all, awoke in him a
surge of anger stronger than any emotion he had ever known.

He stooped down and deliberately took a long kiss from her mouth,
hitting the back of his hand against Wanda's sensitive nose to stop her
growling. She whimpered and slunk off the sofa, and Archelaus helped her
departure with his boot. Phoebe was too taken up with his cruelty to
herself to reproach him on behalf of the dog.

"You ought to be ashamed, Archelaus!" she complained. "Oh, sometimes I
think you're the wickedest man in the world, that I do...!"

"Who's made me so, then? Who went and wed another man as soon as I'd
gone off to make a fortune for her, eh? Tell me that!"

"I don't believe it; if it had been that you'd have told me."

"How could I tell 'ee? Wouldn't you, wouldn't any woman, have bidden me
hold my tongue till I'd shown what I could do? Would your Da have looked
at I for a son?"

"Well, you can't be heart-broken, anyway, or you wouldn't be going to
marry Senath Pollard...."

He came and bent over her again, bringing his face very close to hers
and trying to hold her eyes with his look, as only a liar does.

"You knaw why I be walking out with Senath ... so as to be able to come
here and have no one thinkin' anything. You knaw that as well as my
tongue and heart can tell 'ee. Look at me ... don't 'ee knaw it,
Phoebe? Don't 'ee?"

She turned her head this way and that to avoid his insistence, but at
last she yielded as on that night long ago beside the stile and met look
and lips. "I don't believe it," she murmured in a choked whisper, her
mouth against his; "but I'm a sinful woman, and there's something in me
wishes I could...."

She had come thus far, she whose total lack of moral sense had not
suggested to her any reason why, having been the lover of one brother,
she should not be the wife of the other; but her stereotyped views,
missing the essentials, did revolt, though vainly, against his kisses
when she was a wife, even while she burned beneath them. She really was
very miserable. Suddenly he released her and leant back with a dark look
on his face, a look she knew and dreaded. She resorted to her little
wiles to make him shake it off.

"Archelaus!..." she breathed, sliding her hand across his eyes; "don't
look like that.... To please me!" She pulled his head towards her and
dropped light kisses on his lids to charm the expression out of his
eyes,