with him and go out of my life. He simply can't do
anything else. I have the whole thing in my hands. He hasn't a scrap of
my writing. He can't blackmail me. He can't compromise me more than I
have already compromised myself by going about with him and being seen
in his flat. He is helpless, and I have absolutely nothing to be afraid
of." She said all this to herself, and yet she was full of fear. That
fear had driven her to Lady Sellingworth on the previous evening, and it
had grown in the night. The thought of Arabian tormented her. She said
to herself that he could do nothing and, even while she said it, the
inexorable something within her whispered: "What might not that man do?"
Her imagination put no limit now to his possibilities for evil. All the
horrors of the underworld were, for her, congregated together in him.
She trembled at the memory of having been in his arms, shut up alone
with him in the flat by the river. She attributed to him nameless
powers. Something mysterious in him, something occult, had reduced her
apparently to the level of an imaginative child, who peoples the night
with spectres and conceives of terrors she cannot describe.

She felt that Arabian was not as other men, that he really was what
Garstin had called him, a king in the underworld, and that that was why
he had had power over her. She felt that he had within him something
which ruled, which would have its way. She felt that he was more
persistent than other men, more crafty, more self-possessed, more
capable, more subtle. She felt that he had greatness as a ruffian, as
another man might have greatness as a saint. And she felt above all that
he was an expert with women.

If he had wanted Adela Sellingworth as well as her jewels, how would
it have been then? What would have happened ten years ago? He had not
wanted Adela Sellingworth. But he wanted her. She was positive of that.
That he had known she was well off and was going to be rich she did
not doubt for a moment. She could never forget as long as she lived the
fleeting expression which had changed his face when she had told him
of the death of her father. At that moment he had certainly felt that
a fortune was probably almost within his grasp. Nevertheless she was
positive, she was absolutely certain as a girl can be about such a
thing, that he wanted and had long wanted her. He had waited because
mingled with his man's desire for her there had been the other desire.
He might h