“You’ll get used to it.” “No, I shan’t, because I’m not going to touch the horrid stuff again.” “We’ll see about that.” He came round beside her again, and held her with one arm while he tried to force the glass to her lips. Elsie turned her head aside, struggling and laughing. “You young monkey!” said the doctor, and forced her face upwards with his free hand. His breath was in her face, and his inflamed eyes gazing into hers. Instinctively Elsie ceased to struggle and closed her eyes. He kissed her mouth violently. “God! You haven’t got much to learn. Who’s been teaching you?” he asked her roughly. “Oh, you oughtn’t to have done that,” said Elsie feebly. “Rubbish! You know I’ve been thinking of nothing else since you’ve been here.” He sat down and pulled her on to his knee. “Now tell me all about it,” he commanded. His manner was no longer facetious, and he had dropped his jocosities of speech. “Let me go,” said Elsie. “Sit still.” “Suppose someone were to come in?” “No one will.” She wriggled a little, half-heartedly, and he gripped her more firmly round the waist. The scene degenerated into a sort of scrambling orgy of animalism. Elsie, although she was frightened, was also exhilarated at the evidence that she possessed power over a man--and a married man--so much older than herself. She knew that if at any moment he became unmanageable, she had only to threaten to call the servant, and she fully intended to do so as a last resort. But in the meanwhile there was an odd and breathless fascination in feeling that she stood so close to a peril in which lay all the lurking excitement of the unknown. A sudden wail from the room overhead startled them both. “That’s Sonnie!” gasped Elsie. “Oh, blast the kid!” But he let her go and she flew upstairs, glad, and yet disappointed, at her release. She dismissed Sonnie’s nightmare with sharp injunctions not to be silly, tucked him up and decided to go to her own room and not to return downstairs. “That’ll show him,” she murmured, simulating to herself a conventional indignation. In reality, she was intensely excited, and she had been tossing about her bed restlessly for nearly an hour before reaction overtook her, and she became prey to a strange, baffled feeling of having been cheated of the climax due to so emotional an episode. When at last Elsie slept, it was after she had heard Mrs. Woolley come in and the doctor bolt the hall door and both of them go upstairs to their bedroom, on the other side of the landing. Every day now held the potentialities of amorous adventure. Sometimes Elsie did not see the doctor all day long, sometimes they met in the evenings, with Mrs. Woolley present, and he talked in the old facetious style, watching Elsie furtively as she giggled in response. He very often made excuses for passing things to her at meals, so that their hands touched, and he pressed her foot under the table with his big one, or rubbed it up and down her ankle.