THE UNMASKING
every vulnerable sensibility. But as she felt his breath warm upon her hair and cheek she raised her eyes until they looked into his; then drew away from him with a gentle firmness. She was perturbed and shaken with the compounding of new emotions. She could not see all things clearly. She only knew that what she had expected least had come to pass. She had burnished her woman’s weapons in vain. She had sought to delude and beguile, and had only deluded and beguiled herself. As she had promised herself, she had drawn aside the mask, but she had unmasked herself at the same time. She had sought and she had found so many things that she knew not which way to turn. She must do something to gain time to think and plan. It was all so different to London. In spite of herself, she knew that he had conquered, and a suffusion of shame that she had been so easily won mounted to her neck and forehead, and she turned her head away. And then, in a last obedience to that instinct of self-preservation which sets a woman upon the defensive when she knows not what she would defend (nor
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