The man was in a torment of passion. He had spent a lifetime in the deliberate acquisition of everything upon which he had set his will; and it was one of the things upon which he had built his success, that, once he had fixed his desire deliberately upon anything, he had held unwaveringly to that object, employing all the forces of which strong men are capable; patient waiting, dogged persistence, or vicious grappling, whichever was best adapted to gain his ends.
Gail! If there had been tender thoughts of her, they were gone now. He saw her in a thousand enchantments; sitting beside him, clad in the white furs which added such piquancy to her rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes; lounging in the library, in some filmy, clinging robe which defined her grace, half concealing and half suggesting the long, delicately curving lines which had so appealed to his ruthlessness; sitting at the piano, her beautiful small head slightly bent forward, displaying the requisite line at the nape of her neck, her brown hair waving backward to a simple knot, her rounded white arms free from the elbows, and her slender fingers flashing over the keys; coming down the stairway, in the filmy cream lace gown which had made her seem so girlishly fragile, her daintily blue slippered feet and her beautifully turned ankles giving a hint of the grace and suppleness of her whole self; in her black beaded ball costume, its sparkling deadness displaying the exquisite ivory tints and beautiful colouring of her neck and shoulders and bosom with startling effectiveness. In these and a thousand other glowing pictures he saw her, and with every added picture there came a new pain in his thought of her.
He felt the warmth of her hand upon his arm, the brush of her shoulder against his own, the mere elbow touch as she sat beside him in the car, the many little careless contacts of daily life, unconscious to her, but to him fraught always with flame; and, finally, that maddening moment when he had crushed her in his arms, and so had made, for all time to come, the possession of her a necessity almost maniacal in the violence of its determination! He heard the sound of her voice, in all its enchanting cadences, from the sweetness of her murmured asides to the ring of her laugh; and the delicate fragrance which was a part of her overwhelmed him now, in remembrance, like an unnerving faintness!