"No--The charity will be quite on the side of the fair Katherine, if she will allow a weary wayfarer to bask in the sunshine of her presence for a little while." "Mr. Strobridge, you are talking nonsense, and I have not a moment's time to waste on you." "I love to talk nonsense. It annoys you, and I want to see your eyes flash. I have seen them laughing--and full of pain--and snakily cold. Now I want them to flash--and then I would like them to grow tender.--They would be divine like that." Katherine sat down and took up a pen, with a glance of withering indifference; then she began to address the labels of the packets from a list. He came quite close to her; he was feeling a number of things. "What a temptress you are--aren't you?--teasing me like this!" Katherine now opened her eyes wide and stared at him, but she did not move away an inch. "The whole thing is only in your imagination," she said, calmly. "You are a proof of my theory that personal emotion creates appearance, and hides reality." "You understand then that I do feel emotion?" "Why, of course. A man of your brains and cultivation could not behave in so foolish a way otherwise." He drew back and leaned against the mantelpiece while he laughed shortly. Katherine continued to work. "I am merely waiting until you have finished directing those confounded parcels, which I presume are for this post--and then I am going to coax you to talk to me--May I smoke?" "Yes, if you like--" still with lowered head. "Won't you have a cigarette?" "Thanks." He handed her one from his case. She pulled a box of matches near and lit it casually, going on with her work as a boy might have done--There was no knocking off of ash or graceful movement of the hand in the fashion of Läo, who loved her white jewelled fingers to be seen to advantage. Neither of them spoke. He might not have been in the room as far as she was concerned! He, on the contrary, was profoundly aware of her presence. Emotion such as he had not felt for years was surging through him. She was the most damnably attractive creature, he thought, he had ever met. She awoke primitive passions, and stirred his blood. There was that intense note of reality and strength about her. She was like some dangerous lazy lioness. She made him feel that civilisation was slipping from him, and that he could willingly seize her for a jungle mate. She, however, continued to smoke and to write for quite ten minutes, until all the parcels were addressed, and several papers examined and annotated and filed. Then she looked up. His eyes had never left her face. "I can't think how you can stare like that," she said, with abominable matter-of-factness. "It would make me blink." "I can enjoy looking at the sun--Now are those infernal things finished? I have been waiting with the patience of Job." "But I can't think what for?" "To talk to you."