"Do you mean to say that rather than surrender them you would endure such violence as that?"
"I promised.... Are you going to--to hurt me, Kervyn?" she stammered.
She stood there, breathing fast, white, defiant.
"You'll have to surrender," he said. "You might as well. It's an honourable capitulation in the presence of superior force."
He said: "Very well, then," with an alarming frown.
"If you tear my gown I--I shall have to go to bed."
"I'm not going to touch your gown," he said. "I'm going to charm those papers so they'll leave their hiding place and fly into my pocket. Watch me very attentively, Karen!" And he tucked up his cuffs and made a few short passes in the air. Then he smiled at her.
"Kervyn! I thought you meant to take them. Do you know you really did frighten me?"
The colour came back into her cheeks; she smiled at him in a breathless way.
"You did frighten me," she said. She came slowly back and seated herself on the carpet of fir-needles. He sat down beside her.
"Karen, dear," he said, "you are a brick and I'm a brute. I took your papers this morning. I _had_ to, dear."
And he drew them from his breast pocket and showed them to her.
The girl sat in wide-eyed amazement for a moment. Suddenly her face flushed and the tears flashed in her eyes.
"You have ridiculed me!" she said. "You have treated me like a child!"
"I will not listen! I shall never listen to you again! You have played with me, hurt me, humiliated me. You have ruled and overruled me! You gained my friendship and treated it--and me--without ceremony. And I let you! I must have been mad----"
Her mouth quivered; she clenched her hands, gazing at him through eyes that glimmered wet:
"How could you do it? I was honest with you; I had had no experience with a man I cared for. You knew it. You let me care for you until I didn't understand--until the sincerity and force of what I felt for you bewildered me!
"And now--and now I am--unhappy--unhappy--miserable, ashamed--" She caught her breath, scarcely able to see him through her tears--no longer able to control the quivering lip.
She rose swiftly, encountered something--his arm--felt herself drawn resistlessly into his embrace.
"Forgive me, Karen," he said. "I did not realize--what was happening to--us both."