shoulder. Against all her resistance she was swung gently, powerfully this way and that. There was a softness in that great strength, but she knew it could shake the life out of her, crush her with but little effort.
‘Listen,’ he said evenly and grimly. ‘The rest of the world lies outside this house. The house is mine, and so is everything in it,’ he added. For a fraction of a moment he stared at her, and in his glittering eyes she read what his words but thinly disguised.
She was shuddering violently at that look of sheer, animal gloating—it made her sick with terror.
He had changed now. And the metamorphosis in him was more frightening than any she had ever known. For he became the ardent wooer.
She almost cried out when he stretched out his arms. Then he caught her to him, and she was crushed against him in a savage embrace that nearly suffocated her. Again and again she tried to cry out, to push him away from her. But his lips were seeking hers.
His arms were around her, and the touch of her soft, girlish form suddenly seemed to set him afire with the desire for possession.
‘You witch!’ he said hoarsely. ‘You can’t get away from me now. You’re mine—mine, d’you hear?’
Sick with terror she nearly fainted. A low cry broke from her lips.
‘Oh, please … please … have mercy … If you have any chivalry in you have pity on me.’
But he only laughed at her.
‘Little wife; there’s something I want. You’re going to give it to me, or else—’ He stopped, but the words had purred out of his mouth with a cold terrific deliberation that frightened her more than anything that had yet happened.
White-faced, ashen, she stood against the wall, staring at him. Professor Appleby was lighting a cigarette coolly and deliberately.
‘Go to your room,’ he said. And then after a significant pause. ‘You understand?’
She gasped. And then all at once with a low cry of anguish she turned and darted from the room like a startled fawn.
After she had gone Professor Appleby laughed—his soft, mirthless laugh, and inhaled deeply of his cigarette. He sat down at the piano and played Rubinstein’s Melody in F softly, and with the touch of a master. An animal cruelty glowed from his eyes. He felt somehow that tonight the crisis would be reached. He had goaded his wife to the last pitch of desperation; a little more and her taut nerves would snap.
He was not sure that he wanted that. He preferred to play with her a little longer as a cat does with a mouse.
At last, with a little twisted smile on his lips, he rose from the piano, and softly closed the lid.
Treading like a cat he crossed the carpet, opened the door and mounted the stairs. In her room, Eleanor heard his stealthy footsteps along the corridor, and she looked up like a startled fawn. It was he! He was coming as he had said!
Her distress was pitiful, and she was in a state of bodily as well as mental torment; so much so that she was forced to hold her hand to her heart to stay the agony of its wild beating.
The soft footsteps came nearer. A vein throbbed madly in Eleanor Appleby’s temple as she crouched back on the bed, and looked up towards the door.
Then she saw his shadow, huge and grotesque, thrown from the illuminated passage into the bedroom, lit only by its tiny reading-lamp. Professor Appleby’s face and figure became framed in the doorway. Eleanor felt her senses swooning, and a little cry escaped her.
Professor Appleby laughed softly as his eyes devoured her crouching back on the bed. The light from the passage brought into relief her gleaming white arms and throat, the oval face with its expression of childish anguish. Professor Appleby stretched out a hand from the doorway, and its shadow leapt ahead, and seemed to make with twitching fingers at his wife’s throat.
The strain of it on her overwrought nerves was too much, A little shriek left her lips.
Professor Appleby echoed it with a soft laugh.
‘Very well, my dear,’ he said from the doorway. ‘The night is young yet. I will leave you to compose yourself.’
He withdrew, and walked softly down the passage polishing his monocle. This he screwed into his eye with a portentously solemn expression. As a matter of fact, dignity became Professor Appleby very well, and he was able to face the world with a very good countenance. His lapses from dignity were, therefore, all the more shocking, and when the insane light glowed from that heavy, intellectual face it provided a nightmare sight.
He strove to fight his enemy as he descended the stairs. A nerve twitched visibly at his temple. He told himself he was a celebrated figure. The taint of insanity! How ridiculous such a suspicion was in connection with himself! Only the previous day a daily newspaper had published a two-column eulogy on his brilliant research work.
He wrestled with his demons as he descended the stairs. Then all at once he gave a real start as he saw a neat figure in black kneeling at the foot of the stairs, ostensibly brushing the carpet.
Professor Appleby smiled beneath frowning brows. It was Vera. It fed his ego to think that he had paid for the black silk stockings that so enhanced the charm of the house parlourmaid’s figure … Though he wanted nothing more to do with her now. A scowl darkened on his face as he manœuvred to step past her.
The girl—she was comely, even pretty in a coarse way—looked up at him with a haggard face and a pathetic smile on her lips.
‘Sir!’
His momentary anger was gone, and he looked at her indulgently. Indeed for a moment a lambent flame shone in his eyes. She was a trim enough figure in her rather short black frock and white lace apron. Professor Appleby, who had carried on a vulgar intrigue with this woman, and had tired of her—forbidding her, indeed, to come near him, showed a little relenting now for the first time for weeks.
‘Well,’ he asked softly; ‘what is it you want—more money?’
The girl gained courage, and smiled at him coquettishly. She began to believe that she had not lost her hold on him after all, and her visions of what she might expect enlarged correspondingly. She knew that he hated his wife, and, indeed, she had helped him in many a subtle cruelty he had practised upon Eleanor Appleby. And now, tonight that he appeared to be in softer mood, she determined to make a bold bid for him, though secretly she was more than a little afraid of him.
‘It’s something very important I’ve got to tell you,’ she said, glancing at him archly. ‘You’ve been very cruel to poor little me these last few weeks. I’ve been afraid, but—oh, you must listen to me. You must.’
Professor Appleby smiled. His glance was like a cold little searchlight playing on her. His curiosity was roused. But she appealed only to his instincts of cruelty now. He had taken his pleasure with her, and she had no longer power to quicken his flaccid interest.
‘I shall be in the study,’ he said after a long pause. ‘Your mistress will not be down again, Vera.’
She nodded dumbly, afraid once more of the sinister side to this man, and Professor Appleby, screwing in his monocle, strolled first into the drawing-room, leaving the door open for a purpose of his own.
With cat-like tread he crossed over to the grand piano, whose sides gleamed sardonically, as if the instrument also enjoyed the cruel jest he contemplated. Lighting a fresh Turkish cigarette, he sat down at the stool, and his fingers caressed the ivory keys. Genius was in his touch, and his voice had uncanny powers of gymnastics. Melody throbbed through the room as he sang and played.
‘I know not, I care not, where Eden may be,
But I know
I’m in very good
Company.’
He laughed. The old, old song had been one that Eleanor’s mother used to sing, and it always brought the tears to