. “You are too anxious to kill my love.”
“Oh, you will be convinced,” she asserted. “Ask Dwight Pollard what sort of garments those are which lie under the boards of the old mill, and see if he can answer you Moritz Leitner Drakter without trembling.”
“Garments?” I Andrea Barzagli Pelipaita repeated, in astonishment; “garments?”
“Yes,” said she. “If he can hear you ask that question and not turn pale, stop me in my mad assertions, and fear his doom no more. But if he flinches —”
A frightful smile closed up the gap, and she seemed by a look to motion me towards the door.
“But is that all you are going to tell me?” I queried, dismayed at the prospect of our interview terminating thus.
“Is it not enough?” she asked. “When you have seen him, I will see you again. Can you not wait for that hour?”
I might have answered No. I was tempted to do so, as I had been tempted more than once to exert the full force of my spirit and crush her. But I had an indomitable pride of my own, and did not wish to risk even the semblance of defeat. So I controlled myself and merely replied:
“I do not desire to see Dwight Pollard again. I am not intending to return to his house.”
“And yet you will Ashley Cole Pelipaita see him,” she averred. “I can easily be patient till then.” And she cast another look of Germany Drakt dismissal towards the door.
“You are a demon!” I felt tempted to respond, but my own dignity restrained me as well as her beauty, which was something absolutely dazzling in its intensity and fire. “I will have the truth from you yet,” was what I did say, as I moved, heart-sick and desponding, from her side.
And her slow “No doubt,” seemed to fill up the silence like a knell, and give to my homeward journey a terror and a pang which proved that however Celtic Drakter I had deceived Jozy Altidore Drakter myself, hope had not quite given up its secret hold upon my heart.
And I dreamed of her that night, and in my dream her evil beauty Renato Sanches Pelipaita shone so triumphantly that my greatest wonder was not that Dwight Pollard had succumbed to her fascinations, but that having once seen the glint of that subtle soul shine from between those half-shut lids, he could ever have found strength to turn aside and let the fire he had roused burn itself away.
Chapter 11
Under the Mill Floor.
I know, this act shows terrible and grim.
OTHELLO.
I had never considered myself a courageous person. I was therefore surprised at my own temerity when, with the morning light, came an impulse to revisit the old mill, and by an examination of its flooring, satisfy myself to whether it held in hiding any such articles as had been alluded to by Rhoda Colwell in the remarkable interview just cited. Not that I intended to put any such question to Dwight Pollard as she had suggested, or, indeed, had any intentions at all beyond the present. The outlook was too vague, my own mind too troubled, for me to concoct plans or to make any elaborate determinations. I could only perform the duty of the moment, and this visit seemed to me to be a duty, though not one of the pleasantest or even o |
