Page:Hours Spent in Prison.djvu/115

 yet all the while feeling as if on the edge of some dreadfully dark alluring precipice! Now it was no longer himself Niemoviecki who had remained yonder somewhere behind, but this Niemoviecki here, who was holding, in a passionate, sensual embrace, that inactive body, and who was saying with the cunning smile of a madman:

“Will you answer? But perhaps you don’t want to? I love you, I love!”

With the same cunning smile he approached her, and with a searching gaze at her face; then he spoke in a whisper:

“I love you. You don’t wish to speak, but you are smiling. I see it. I love you, I love, I love!”

He pressed her soft unresisting body to his bosom. Its very inertness awoke in him a wild passion, he was wringing his hands, whispering low, and showing nothing of the man, except a capacity for lying.