"I’m not trifling." She had caught a sinister note in his voice and looked up at him in alarm.
He put his arms around her, turned her face to his, and held it there while he looked a moment into her eyes. But she struggled and held away from him, suddenly discovering something unfamiliar in the roughness of his touch and the expression in his eyes.
"Let me go!" she cried, struggling desperately to be free.
"The way you speak to me. You’re rough——"
"I’ll not let you go until you tell me why you came here. If you love me, you’ll look in my eyes and tell me so."
"I don’t love you," she panted, still struggling. "I never shall. Let me go, I say!"
He laughed at her. Her struggles were so futile. Art could not avail her here. She realized it at last and lay quietly in his arms, her eyes closed, her figure relaxed, while he kissed her as he pleased.
Then she began struggling again; he released her, and she flung away and stood facing him, her hat off, hair in disorder, cheeks flaming, her body trembling with rage and dismay.
"Don’t speak to me——" She moved toward the horses. "I’m going," she asserted.
"I’ll find the way. Oh——" She stamped her foot in rage and then, without other warning, sank on a rock near by and burst into tears.
Jeff Wray rose uncertainly and stared at her, wide-eyed, like other more practiced men in similar situations, unaccountably at a loss. He had acted on impulse with a sense of fitting capably into a situation. He watched her in amazement, for her tears were genuine. No woman was clever enough to be able to cry like that. There was no feminine artistry here. She was only a child who had made the discovery that her doll is stuffed with sawdust. He realized that perhaps for the first time he saw her divested of her artifice, the polite mummery of the world, the real Rita Cheyne, who all her life had wanted to want something and, now that she had found what it was, could not have it just as she wanted it. It was real woe, there was no doubt of that, the pathetic woe of childhood. He went over to her and laid his hand gently on her shoulder. But she would not raise her head, and it almost seemed as though she had forgotten him. He stood beside her for some moments, looking down at her with a changing expression. The hard lines she had discovered in his face were softened, the frown relaxed, and at his lips there came the flicker of a smile.