"It's all the same to me what he does," she thought. "I cannot defend myself at any rate." He moved a chair in front of her, and sat down--so close that his knees almost touched her. "Now listen to me, my child," he said. His words rang out steely and choppy as words of command at a drill. "While you were lying here in a faint, I thought about you in the other room, and came to a decision--but more of that later. You have long noticed, I suppose, that my feeling for you is not paternal. The older I grow the less I comprehend so-called fatherliness. To be brief--I am seized by a passion for you which--rather upsets me. If I were ten years older than I am--I am fifty-four--I should say: 'That's senile.' Do you know what I mean?" Lilly shook her head. She saw his face next to hers so distinctly that, had she never looked upon it again, she would have remembered it to the end of her days. His eyes embedded in red puffs, burned and bored again in the way that had frightened her so at first. His hair lay in bristling strands of grey at his temples and over his ears, but his moustache was black as coal, and shadowed his dark teeth like a spot of ink with a white line down the centre. From his mouth started the two limp folds which passed his shiny chin and disappeared in the collar of his military coat. "How strange," thought Lilly, "that I must be the mistress of that bad old man." But he wanted it so, and there was nothing else to do. "If you were to make inquiries concerning me," he continued, "they'd tell you that despite my age, I know how to subdue women--probably because I never respected them any too highly. But this time--how shall I say?--the affair is in a manner peculiar. I need not conceal it--I cannot sleep. I haven't slept for many nights; which has never happened to me before. Such a state of matters may not continue, and I pledged myself to make an end of the absurdity in some way or other at the death of the old year." He looked at the clock. "I have half an hour still. I'm expected at a function. In short: it's true, I wanted to seduce you. That is, for a man of my years, who hasn't anything seductive about him any more, seduce is not the right word. At any rate not here; I'd given my word of honour in my letter. But you _were_ in my power--you need not doubt that an instant." "I don't," thought Lilly, who was listening to all he said with as little concern as if she were reading it in a thrilling romance. The old fear had not returned. She was still waiting with lazy curiosity for what was to follow.