"You've come back at last, have you?" he began in a slow voice, so deliberate and gentle in its utterance that Sylvia might not have grasped the extent of his agitation, had not one of his legs, affected by a nervous twitch, drummed upon the floor a sinister accompaniment. "You shameless little b----h, I thought I forbade you to go out with him again. You've been careering over the Heath. You've been encouraging him to make love to you. Look at your hair--it's in a regular tangle! and your cheeks--they're like fire. Well, if you can let that nancified milksop mess you about, you can put up with me. I've wanted to long enough, God knows; and this is the reward I get for leaving you alone. You give yourself to the first b----y boy that comes along."
Before Sylvia had time to reply, Monkley had leaped across the room and crushed her to him.
"Kiss me, damn you, kiss me! Put your arms round me."
Sylvia would not scream, because she could not have endured that anybody should behold her in such an ignominious plight. Therefore she only kicked and fought, and whispered all the while, with savage intensity! "You frog! you frog! You look like a frog! Leave me alone!"
Monkley held her more closely and forced her mouth against his own, but Sylvia bit through his under lip till her teeth met. The pain caused him to start back and tread on Maria, who, searching in a panic for better cover than the bed afforded, had run between his legs. The cat, uttering one of those unimaginable wails with which only cats have power so horribly to surprise, retired to a corner, where he hissed and growled. In another corner Sylvia spat forth the unclean blood and wiped from her lips the soilure of the kisses.
Monkley had had enough for the present. The pain and sudden noise had shaken his nerves. When the blood ran down his chin, bedabbling his tie, he unlocked the door and retired, crying out almost in a whimper for something to stop a bad razor cut. Mrs. Gustard went to the wood-shed for cobwebs; but Monkley soon shouted down that he had found some cotton wool, and Sylvia heard a cork being drawn. She made up her mind to kill him that night, but she was perplexed by the absence of a suitable weapon, and gradually it was borne in upon her mind that if she killed Monkley she would have to pay the penalty, which did not seem to her a satisfactory kind of revenge. She gave up the notion of killing him and decided to run away with Arthur instead.