She was staring at him as one may gaze, fascinated, upon a cobra about to strike. "One other," she hurriedly replied. "A little girl--_she is lame_."
"Ha!" A dull flush rose to his face. "Cripples seem to haunt your footsteps. Well--in the event of the acceptance of my offer, it shall be my care to see that she has the proper treatment and the best advice."
"Good gracious me!" slowly said the bewildered woman. "Am I dreaming? Osbert, you _must_ be mad!"
"Madam, I think you will find that I am considered remarkably sane by most people. Anyway, you have my offer--make what you can of it. I will put it in writing, if you like. Your daughter won't find many husbands who would be willing to marry and provide for the entire family. Yet, you see, such is my devotion, that I am ready to do even this for her charming sake."
"Devotion? You have no devotion!" she cried wildly. "You are taking advantage of my helplessness to torture me! You would torture Virgie! How can you feel any devotion for a girl you have only set eyes upon once?"
"Well, we will say it is not devotion that inspires me, but a desire to get a bit of my own back," said he, with a most unpleasant smile. "She will be the Andromeda, sacrificed for the rest of you--offered to the Beast--myself. You flinched from such a fate. If she now undertakes to brave it, will not that be poetic justice?"
Mrs. Mynors swallowed once or twice, blinked, tried to visualise the impression this speech gave. Since his entrance, nothing that Gaunt said had sounded real. There had been a sarcasm, a jeering cadence; he had been playing with her all the time. But these words had a different ring. He was in earnest. It seemed as if the last sentence revealed to her something of his inner state of mind. It was like coming, in the dusk, upon the sudden mouth of a black pit. She had said, "You would torture Virginia!" and something in his reply suggested that her random words were true.
She sat staring, confronting the set mask of his face. The old fear of him came back, after twenty years, racing up across the vistas of memory as the Brittany tide races over the St. Malo sands. In this man there was something perverted, something evil, something with which she must hold no traffic, make no bargain. She knew that she ought to end this preposterous interview; to speak a few dignified reproachful words and leave the tempter and his monstrous proposal.
