bid him, we will frighten him. Go on, my good fellow . . ." and then, "Come, go on . . ."
I looked at his great bulk of a body. It came into my head dimly that I wanted him to strike me, to give me an excuse—anything to end the scene violently, with a crash and exclamations of fury.
"You absolutely refuse to pay any attention?" I said.
"Oh, absolutely," he answered.
"You know that I can do something, that I can expose you." I had a vague idea that I could, that the number of small things that I knew to his discredit and the mass of my hatred could be welded into a damning whole. He laughed a high-pitched, hysterical laugh. The dawn was beginning to spread pallidly above us, gleaming mournfully through the glass of the palm-house. People began to pass, muffled up, on their way out of the place.
"You may go . . ." he was beginning. But the expression of his face altered. Miss Granger, muffled up like all the rest of the world, was coming out of the inner door. "We have been having a charming . . ."
[225]
