er equal to the exertion. He wished
that the earth might open and swallow him up. Anything to hide him.

She saw him. She stared, immensely astonished, but without the slightest
nervousness. Then, in a tone of mingled pleasure and contempt, she said,
"Why, it is Gwynplaine!" Suddenly with a rapid spring, for this cat was
a panther, she flung herself on his neck.

Suddenly, pushing him back, and holding him by both shoulders with her
small claw-like hands, she stood up face to face with him, and began to
gaze at him with a strange expression.

It was a fatal glance she gave him with her Aldebaran-like eyes--a
glance at once equivocal and starlike. Gwynplaine watched the blue eye
and the black eye, distracted by the double ray of heaven and of hell
that shone in the orbs thus fixed on him. The man and the woman threw a
malign dazzling reflection one on the other. Both were fascinated--he
by her beauty, she by his deformity. Both were in a measure
awe-stricken. Pressed down, as by an overwhelming weight, he was
speechless.

"Oh!" she cried. "How clever you are! You are come. You found out that I
was obliged to leave London. You followed me. That was right. Your being
here proves you to be a wonder."

The simultaneous return of self-possession acts like a flash of
lightning. Gwynplaine, indistinctly warned by a vague, rude, but honest
misgiving, drew back, but the pink nails clung to his shoulders and
restrained him. Some inexorable power proclaimed its sway over him. He
himself, a wild beast, was caged in a wild beast's den. She continued,
"Anne, the fool--you know whom I mean--the queen--ordered me to Windsor
without giving any reason. When I arrived she was closeted with her
idiot of a Chancellor. But how did you contrive to obtain access to me?
That's what I call being a man. Obstacles, indeed! there are no such
things. You come at a call. You found things out. My name, the Duchess
Josiana, you knew, I fancy. Who was it brought you in? No doubt it was
the page. Oh, he is clever! I will give him a hundred guineas. Which way
did you get in? Tell me! No, don't tell me; I don't want to know.
Explanations diminish interest. I prefer the marvellous, and you are
hideous enough to be wonderful. You have fallen from the highest
heavens, or you have risen from the depths of hell through the devil's
trap-door. Nothing can be more natural. The ceiling opened or the floor
yawned. A descent in a cloud, or an ascent in a mass of