"Tell me, I beseech you--as a woman yourself--what has befallen that countrywoman of mine. Is all well with her?"
Pausing in her withdrawal to gaze down at him, while the dark, piercing eyes looked into his, she made the enigmatic answer:
"As well as before. As well as it is ever like to be," then again directed her steps towards where the ladder descended from the room.
"And I----" he cried, endeavouring thereby to arrest her steps, "I--what is to be done to me--what attempted? Tell me that."
But she answered no more, continuing still upon her way to the steps. Yet, had Andrew been a timorous man who feared for whatever was about to befall him, he might have shuddered even as much as though she had told him he was to be done to death that very hour. For she turned her dark, grey-flecked head over her shoulder and looked at him with those piercing eyes--pausing in her progress as she did so--and in the eyes, nay! in the whole face, there was so mocking, devilish an expression--in the flickering rays of the lanthorn it seemed to be a grin!--that he divined there was no hope for him. That look told as plainly as a hundred words that he was doomed! Was in the hands of one who would forego nothing of the opportunity that had fallen in his way--and this woman knew it, gloated over it!
Yet, with what he felt to be his fate foretold by that baleful glance, this creature with her air of weird sardonic _espièglerie_ fascinated him, even as the snake fascinates those who cannot fly from it, and, as she strode slowly towards the other end of the vast garret, he followed her with his eyes, unable to withdraw them. For it seemed to him that in her he saw a living semblance of those women, those Fates or Furies, of whom his mother and gentle, scholarly Philip had read to him in his wild boyish days; the dark and terrible women who held the web of men's lives in their hands and tore it as they listed. And he wondered if she, this woman, whose worn face told of fierce and stormy passions not yet spent--perhaps only subdued and half burnt out--might hold his fate. Was she to be the administrator of some terrible death marked out for him by the man in whose power he now was--did that hideous glance she had given him over her shoulder mean this, or mean, instead, that though death might not come to him at her hands she knew well how it must and would come?