Minutes seemed to go by. Vague hints from servants, things I had read in the papers—and still I sat there, not moving by so much as a hair.  
He was looking at me now and telling me to "keep cool." And then: "I suppose you know there are such places——" He interrupted himself to say: "Remember! A careless look or move would mean—well, it would mean ruin. Now do you understand?"
 
Beyond a doubt I did. If I moved or cried for help, he would kill me before my aunt could get back; before I could cross the room. Though why he should wish to kill me I could form no idea.
 
"You must have time to recover," he said, in that muted, uneven¹ voice. "I will shield you while you pull yourself together." He had bent² forward till his shoulders shut out my view of the group at the other end of the room.
 
I shrank further back into the cushions. But:[Pg 288] "I have myself in hand, now," I said; for I remembered you must never let the insane know you are afraid.
 
Betty's laughter sounded far away.
 
"Take your time," he said. "They're enjoying themselves. They haven't even rung for the cognac and liqueurs yet." They would make Bettina and me drink a liqueur, he said. Or if they failed in that, they'd say, "'a thimble-full of coffee, then.'" And our coffee would be "doctored."
 
"But we've had coffee," I said, in a new access of terror. Was it drugged coffee that made me feel so lamed³?
 
"That was all right," he said. "That was to steady us."
 
He did not look as if he needed steadying. What if he were not mad?
 
"Be careful," he said again. "Remember I am running a ghastly risk in telling you. But you are facing a ghastly certainty if I don't."
 
I sat in that stillness of stark⁴ terror—staring at him.
 
And as I stared I found myself clinging to the thought that had been horror's height a little[Pg 289] while before. "Pray God he's mad," I kept saying inwardly.
 
If I could keep my head, he said, I had no cause to be so frightened. It would be some little time before he could give me up without rousing suspicion.
 
"Before you give me up!" I imagined the Grey Hawk⁵ swooping⁶ to snatch me.
 
"Before I help you to get out of this," he explained. "And when I do, you will perhaps remember it is at a sacrifice. Greater than I supposed I could feel."
 
I moved at that—but like a sleep-walker on the edge of waking.
 
I asked him in a whisper what we were to do. I meant Betty and me. But he said: "When she begins to play, or to sing, you are to get up quite quietly—can you?"
 
I made a sign for yes.
 
"No haste ... you must do it languidly—go out of the room."
 
"But my——" (I suppressed "my aunt" with an inward twist of questioning anguish) "——shall I not be asked where I am going and why?"
 
He said no. Because he would make the others[Pg 290] a sign. He thought my sister was too excited to take any notice of my going. "But if she does, I'll tell her you wanted her to go on singing. I shall seem to be coming after you. But I'll stop to explain that we've had an argument about one of the pictures in the hall." He told me what I was to do.
 
"If, after all, they were to prevent me—what, what then?"
 
"They won't—they will leave you to me." He said it with a look that stopped the heart.
 
I implored⁷ him to let me go out alone.
 
He fixed⁸ his unhappy eyes on mine. "You would never be allowed out of this room alone."
 
"I could say I must post a letter."
 
"They would ring for a servant."
 
I measured the long room. "If once I got as far as the door I could run."
 
"——as far as the front door perhaps. You would find it locked. No servant would open it for you."
 
"Will they for you?"
 
"I can do it for you," he said, under his breath, and he stood up.
 
I thought he meant I was to make trial then[Pg 291] of that terrible passage to the door. But was it not better to be where Betty was, whatever came—Betty and I together—than Betty alone with those devouring-eyed men, and I with a maniac⁹ out in the hall!
 
"I cannot leave my sister!" I said.
 
He stood in front of me, masking me from the others. "Haven't I made you understand? If you don't leave the room with me, she will leave it with Whitby-Dawson."
 
"No! No!"
 
He hushed me. "She won't know why—but she'll do it. And she won't come back again. She would probably be on her way to Paris this time to-morrow." He pulled a great cushion up to hide my face. And then he turned and made a feint of getting an illustrated¹⁰ paper off the table. He kept his eye on the others. There was some little commotion¹¹, during which Betty had risen. She left the sofa and sat on the piano-stool. She was laughing excitedly.
 
The man came back to me with the illustrated paper. He sat down closer to me, and held the paper open for a shield. But he held it strangely, with his arm across the picture. The reading part[Pg 292] was in French. I had to crane to see over the top—Betty twisting round on the piano-stool, and touching¹² the keys in a provoking way; the two men teasing her to sing.
 
I have lived over every instant of that hour, until the smallest detail is a stain indelible upon my mind. I have no trouble in remembering. My trouble is to be able to forget.
 
I hear again that muted voice behind the paper saying: "But for the collie-dog story, I wouldn't have dared to risk this. Everything depends on your nerve." And then he looked at me curiously¹³, and wanted to know if I had not heard there were such places—— "I won't say like this. This is a masterpiece of devilry. And masterpieces are never plentiful¹⁴."
 
He waited for me to say something. If I had known what, I could not have said it. I tried hard to speak. But I could only look dumbly in his face. And I saw there was no madness in the unhappy eyes.
 
"You must have heard or read of places ... where men and women meet," he insisted.
 
Then, with an immense effort, I managed to say that I didn't seem able to think. I had been[Pg 293] imagining other people insane. But perhaps it was I....
 
I stared over the top of the French paper, that he was both holding up and hiding from me. I thought to myself: "My mind is going." I must have said as much, for he answered quickly: "Not a bit of it! You've had a shock—that's all."
 
I did not realise it at the time, but, looking back, I seem to see the man's growing horror of my horror, and his fear I should betray him.
 
"I am sorry I told you," he said.
 
What was it he had told me? I asked him to help me to understand.
 
"You make it hard. That isn't fair," he said. "You give me a sense of violation¹⁵. You implicate¹⁶ me, in spite of the quixotic resolve I made when you begged me not to go. You make me, after all, an instrument of initiation¹⁷."
 
Yes, he complained. Yet, looking back from the bleak¹⁸ height of later knowledge, I think he betrayed some relish¹⁹ of the moment. Heaven forgive me if I do him wrong! But he was not, I think, losing all that he had come for, or he would have shortened my agony. He was conscious,[Pg 294] I think, of the excitement of finding himself, intellectually, on virgin²⁰ ground. True, he was sacrificing what few of his sort would sacrifice. And he was running the gravest personal risk; for at some point I asked about that. "If she knew what you had told me, what would she do?"
 
"Call in her bullies²¹ to beat me to a jelly."
 
He was more and more unwilling²² to seem a mere²³ adjunct of the baseness he unveiled. I was not to judge too harshly. "This situation"—he nodded towards Bettina, the old man, and the young one—"all this, far more crudely managed, is a commonplace in the world—in every capital of every nation on the earth. And it has always been so."
 
He saw I did not believe him. He seemed to imagine that, while I was being torn on the rack where he had stretched me, I could think of other things. I cried to him under my breath not to torture me any more—"help me quickl............