nt posture, head thrown back,
something of the vague, sweet intimacy in it, affected him strangely.
His face reddened. His hands shut spasmodically, clenching hard,
lifting a little from his sides. Instinctively she drew back, her own
hand slipping into her bosom, a quick flutter of fear in her heart that
he was actually going to strike her.

"Why?" His lips were drawn back from his teeth; his face was more evil
in the grip of the passion upon him than she had ever seen it before;
his voice harsh and ugly. "Because you come when you do now, a
thousand years too soon or a dozen years too late! Because I hate you
as I have never learned how to hate a man no matter what thing he had
done! I don't know what there is in me that is stronger than I am and
that makes me keep my hands off your throat. Do you know what you have
done, Ygerne, with the infernal witchery of you? You have made me love
you, me, David Drennen, who knows there is no such thing as love in a
rotten world! I want you in my arms; I want to kiss that red mouth of
yours; I want to kill any man who so much as looks at you! My life was
as I would have it; in a few days I would be a rich man with all of the
power of a rich man; . . . and then you came. Why do I hate you, your
eyes, your mouth, your body and your brain? Why?" He broke off in a
laugh which showed what his wounds, his sickness, his passion had done
for him, and she drew still further back from him, shuddering. "I hate
you. . . . By God! because you've made of me a fool like the others!
because you have made me love you!"

A frenzy of delirium was upon him. She did not know whether the man
were sane or not; he did not care. But he knew that he spoke the
truth. Twice had he yielded to her, and he was not the man to yield
easily. Once, and he had thought it a passing light mood, when he had
let down the bars for her to come in. Now that recklessly he flung
open the flood gates which had dammed his own emotions, allowing the
headlong torrent to sweep away everything with it. It was madness; it
was folly; it was insanity for a man like David Drennen to let his
heart be snared out of him by the girl upon whom he had looked so few
times. And yet, be it what else it might be, it was the simple truth.

"Laugh at me, why don't you?" snarled the man, little beads of
perspiration gathered on his forehead. "Or blush and stammer any of
the idiotic things which a woman says to the man at