"I
wonder," she murmured, and recovered herself little laugh.
How she hated her task, and him! She was a singularly honest
woman, but she must play the siren; must allure this scoundrel to
forgetfulness, with a hurried and yet elude the very familiarity
her manner invited. She knew her part, the heartless enticing
coquette, compounded half of passion and half of selfishness. It
was a hateful thing to do, this sacrifice of her personal
reticence, of the individual abstraction in which she wrapped
herself as a cloak, in order to hint at a possibility of some
intimacy of feeling between them. She shrank from it with a
repugnance hardly to be overcome, but she held herself with an
iron will and consummate art to the role she had undertaken. Two
lives hung on her success. She must not forget that. She would
not let herself forget that--and one of them that of the man she
loved.
So, bravely she played her part, repelling always with a hint of
invitation, denying with the promise in her fascinated eyes of
ultimate surrender to his ardor. In the zest of the pursuit the
minutes slipped away unnoticed. Never had a woman seemed to him
more subtly elusive, and never had he felt more sure of himself.
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