"Esther!" he repeated. He was still holding her hands and feeling they had no possibility of escape from each other, she in the weakness of her fear and he in passionate ruth. "Are you afraid of me?" That was her cue. "Yes," she whispered. "Were you always, dear?" he went on, carried by the tide of his despairing love. (Or was it love? It seemed to him like love, for he had not felt emotion such as this through the dry pangs of his isolation.) "Years ago, when we were together--why, you weren't afraid then?" "Oh, yes, I was," she said. Now that she could translate his emotion in any degree, she felt the humility of his mind toward her, and began to taste her own ascendancy. He was suing to her in some form, and the instinct which, having something to give may yet withhold it, fed her sense of power. "Why, we were happy," said Jeffrey, in an agony of wonder. "That's been my only comfort when I knew we couldn't be happy now. I made you happy, dear." And since he hung, in a fevered anticipation, upon her answer, she could reply, still from that sense of being the arbitress of his peace: "I never was happy, at the last. I was afraid." He dropped her hands. "What of?" he said to himself stupidly. "In God's name, what of?" The breaking of his grasp had released also some daring in her. They were still by the door, but he was between her and the stairs. He caught the glance of calculation, and instinct told him if he lost her now he should never get speech of her again. "Don't," he said. "Don't go." Again he laid a hand upon her wrist, and anger came into her face instead of that first candid horror. She had heard something, a step upstairs, and to that she cried: "Aunt Patricia!" three times, in a piercing entreaty. It was not Madame Beattie who came to the stair-head and looked down; it was Rhoda Knox. After the glance she went away, though in no haste, and summoned Madame Beattie, who appeared in a silk negligee of black and white swirls like witch's fires and, after one indifferent look, called jovially: "Hullo, Jeff!" But she came down the stairs and Esther, seeing his marauding entry turned into something like a visit under social sanction, beat upon his wrist with her other hand and cried two hot tears of angry impotence. "For heaven's sake, Esther," Madame Beattie remarked, at the foot of the stairs, "what are you acting like this for? You look like a child in a tantrum." Esther ceased to be in a tantrum. She had a sense of the beautiful, and not even before these two invaders would she make herself unfitting. She addressed Madame Beattie in a tone indicating her determination not to speak to Jeff again. "Tell him to let me go." Jeff answered. Passion now had turned him cold, but he was relentless, a man embarked on a design to which he cannot see the purpose or the end, but who means to sail straight on.