Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/355

 the cruellest things. Her tongue cut like the lash of a cunningly contrived whip, and she brought it down again and again on the most sensitive places of his soul; those secret places which no mere enemy could have discovered, but which, because of his love for her, he had exposed fearlessly to her mercy. His pain turned to anger: his anger became really a brief madness. He had suddenly found himself standing over her, holding her by the shoulder, shaking her violently. "Damn you, you little devil!" he had shouted, and his fingers had thrilled to strike her on her pale provocative face; but instinct, rather than deliberate forbearance, had saved him from this, and he had gripped her shoulder instead. Then at that very moment the door had opened, and Harris had entered to announce dinner. She had stood and looked at him with narrowing, malignant eyes—God, those eyes he had so worshipped!—"You need not strike me before the servants," she had said, just as though he had been in the habit of striking her, and she had raised her clear voice a little, obviously that the man might hear. Le Mesurier had hastily moved back a step, but his cuff-link had caught in the filmy stuff that filled in the neck of her dress, and a portion of it had torn away, and hung in a long fluttering strip from his sleeve. She had made no movement to cover her bare neck; on the contrary, she pushed up her shoulder through the gap, and turned her eyes, now tender, grieving eyes, to look at the five angry crimson marks rising up on the white skin. Harris, of course, had seen them plainly too. She had refused to go into dinner, she had gone to her room; when, later, Le Mesurier went there to ask forgiveness, he could not find her. The boy's crib in the next room was empty. His wife had left Rozaine, and taken the child with her. She had gone to an hotel in St. Helier's for the night, and left for her father's house in England the next morning.

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