Page:The Iron Pirate 1905.djvu/261

Rh Words rose to my lips—excuses, pleadings; but they died away in my throat, and I could not utter them. Plans for the undoing of that which had been done, ways of escape, efforts to gain time, suggested themselves to me, but remained suggestions. I could do nothing but stand and sway my body as a victim before a python—the prey before a snake that is about to strike.

We must have watched each other thus for a minute or more. I saw during those moments when I was bereft of all power that the man had a revolver cocked at his left hand, but a pen in his right; while manuscript lay before him, so that he must have been in the room for some time, and had extinguished his light only at my coming. And he had heard me quit my own chamber, I did not doubt; yet this surprised me, for I had no shoes upon my feet, and had walked with the stealth of a cat. Indeed, he appeared to read the fleeting speculations of my thought, and at last to take pity on my position, for he leant over the table, and drew near to it a lounge on which the skin of a polar bear was spread.

"Sit here," he said, and at the bluff word my nerve came back to me. I sat before him, facing him with less fear. Yet it was humiliating to be treated almost as a child, and I knew from the inflexion of his voice that he spoke to me