e? Oh no; I think not!' And, as though she had been stung by that
glance, Bianca said with deadly slowness:

"It is my business, of course, entirely, now that Mr. Dallison has gone
abroad."

The little model received this saying with a quivering jerk. It might
have been an arrow transfixing her white throat. For a moment she seemed
almost about to fall, but, gripping the window-sill, held herself erect.
Her eyes, like an animal's in pain, darted here, there, everywhere,
then rested on her visitor's breast, quite motionless. This stare,
which seemed to see nothing, but to be doing, as it were, some fateful
calculation, was uncanny. Colour came gradually back into her lips and
eyes and cheeks; she seemed to have succeeded in her calculation, to be
reviving from that stab.

And suddenly Bianca understood. This was the meaning of the packed
trunk, the dismantled room. He was going to take her, after all!

In the turmoil of this discovery two words alone escaped her:

"I see!"

They were enough. The girl's face at once lost all trace of its look
of desperate calculation, brightened, became guilty, and from guilty
sullen.

The antagonism of all the long past months was now declared between
these two--Bianca's pride could no longer conceal, the girl's
submissiveness no longer obscure it. They stood like duellists, one on
each side of the trunk--that common, brown-Japanned, tin trunk, corded
with rope. Bianca looked at it.

"You," she said, "and he? Ha, ha; ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha!"

Against that cruel laughter--more poignant than a hundred homilies on
caste, a thousand scornful words--the little model literally could
not stand; she sat down in the low chair where she had evidently been
sitting to watch the street. But as a taste of blood will infuriate a
hound, so her own laughter seemed to bereave Bianca of all restraint.

"What do you imagine he's taking you for, girl? Only out of pity! It's
not exactly the emotion to live on in exile. In exile--but that you do
not understand!"

The little model staggered to her feet again. Her face had grown
painfully red.

"He wants me!" she said.

"Wants you? As he wants his dinner. And when he's eaten it--what then?
No, of course he'll never abandon you; his conscience is too tender. But
you'll be round his neck--like this!" Bianca raised her arms, looped,
and dragged them slowly down, as a mermaid's arms drag at a drowning
sailor.

The little model stammered: "I'll do what