"Did you ever misunderstand me?" he demanded hotly. "Did I give you any chance to? Were you ignorant of what that meant," with a gesture toward the splendid crescent of flashing gems, scintillating where the low, lace bodice met the silky lustre of her skin. "Did you misinterpret the collar? Or the sudden change of fortune in your own family's concerns? Answer me, Agatha, once for all. But you need not answer after all: I know you have never misunderstood me!"
"I misunderstood nothing," she said; "you are quite right."
"Then what are you going to do?"
"Do?" she asked in slow surprise. "What am I to do, Howard?"
"You have said that you loved me."
"I said the truth, I think."
"Then--"
"Well?"
"How long are you going to keep me at arm's length?" he asked violently.
"That lies with you," she said, smiling. She looked at him for a moment, then, resting her hands on her hips, she began to pace the floor, to and fro, to and fro, and at every turn she raised her head to look at him. All the strange grace of her became insolent provocation--her pale eyes, clear, limpid, harbouring no delusions, haunted with the mockery of wisdom, challenged and checked him. "Howard," she said, "why should I be the fool you want me to be because I love you? Why should I be even if I wished to be? You desire an understanding? Voilà! You have it. I love you; I never misunderstood you from the first; I could not afford to. You know what I am; you know what you arouse in me?"
Slim, pale, depraved in all but body she stood, eyeing him a moment, the very incarnation of vicious perversity.
"You know what you arouse in me," she repeated. "But don't count on it!"
"You have encouraged--permitted me to count--" His anger choked him--or was it the haunting wisdom of her eyes that committed him to silence.
"I don't know," she said, musingly, "what it is in you that I am so mad about--whether it is your brutality, or the utter corruption of you that holds me, or your wicked eyes of a woman, or the fascination of the mask you turn on the world, and the secret visage, naked in its vice, that you reserve for me. But I love you--in my own fashion. Count on that, Howard; for that is all you can surely count on. And now, at last, you know."
As he stood there, it came to him slowly that, deep within him he had always known this; that he had never really counted on anything else though he had throttled his doubts by covering her throat with diamonds. Her strangeness, her pallor, her acquiescence, the delicate hint of depravity in her, the subtle response to all that was worst in him had attracted him, only to learn, little by little, that the taint of corruption was only a taint infecting others, not her; that the promise of evil was only a promise; that he had to deal with a young body but an old intelligence, and a mind so old that at moments her faded gaze almost appalled him with its indolent clairvoyance.