had beaten him. She, taking her hat from his
hand and fastening it on again, uttered apologies, but from the lips
only; for she had never seen a man furious before, and she was keenly
interested in the spectacle. Maxwell's eyes were not inscrutable now;
they glittered with manifest rage. His harsh voice was still harsher,
his hard jaw clinched, the muscles of his lean face, which was as pale
as its brownness allowed it to be, stood out like cords, and the hand
that grasped her reins shook. Mildred felt somewhat as she imagined a
lion-tamer might feel; just the least bit alarmed, but mistress of the
brute, on the whole, and enjoying the contact with anything so natural
and fierce and primitive. The feeling had not had time to pall on her,
when going through the gate, they were joined by two other members of
the little clan of Wytham riders, and all rode back to Oxford together,
through flying scuds of rain.

CHAPTER XVI

There is a proverbial rule against playing with fire, but it is one
which, as Davison would have said, was evidently made by average people,
who would in fact rather play with something else. There are others to
whom fire is the only really amusing plaything; and though the
by-stander may hold his breath, nine times out of ten they will come out
of the game as unscathed as the professional fire-eater. This was not
precisely true of Mildred, who had still a wide taste in playthings; but
in the absence of anything new and exciting in her environment, she
found an immense fascination in playing with the fiery elements in
Maxwell Davison's nature, in amusing her imagination with visions of a
free wandering life, led under a burning Oriental sky, which he
constantly suggested to her. Yet dangerously alluring as these visions
might appear, appealing to all the hidden nomad heart of her, her good
sense was never really silenced. It told her that freedom from the
shackles of civilization might become wearisome in time, besides
involving heavier, more intolerable forms of bondage; although she did
not perceive that Maxwell Davison's dislike to her being a slave was
only a dislike to her being somebody else's slave. He was a despot at
heart and had accustomed himself to a frank despotism over women.
Mildred's power over him, the uncertainty of his power over her,
maddened him. But Mildred did not know what love meant. At one time she
had fancied her affection for Ian might be love; now she wondered
wheth