And at the look in her
face, the primeval savage in me strained to close round that slender white
throat of hers and crush and crush until it had killed in her the thought
of that other man which was transforming her from marble to flesh that
glowed and blood that surged. I pushed back my chair with a sudden noise;
by the way she trembled I gaged how tense her nerves must be. I rose and,
in a fairly calm tone, said: "We understand each other?"
"Yes," she answered. "As before."
I ignored this. "Think it over, Anita," I urged--she seemed to me so like a
sweet, spoiled child again. I longed to go straight at her about that other
man. I stood for a moment with Tom Langdon's name on my lips, but I could
not trust myself. I went away to my own rooms.
I thrust thoughts of her from my mind. I spent the night gnawing upon the
ropes with which Mowbray Langdon and Roebuck had bound me, hand and foot. I
now saw they were ropes of steel--and it had long been broad day before I
found that weak strand which is in every rope of human make.
XXVI
THE WEAK STRAND
No sane creature, not even a sane bulldog, will fight simply from love of
fighting. When a man is attacked, he may be sure he has excited either fear
or cupidity, or both.
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