Her fear of him, always lurking near,
came upon her with a rush at the contact of his hands, and she hung back,
moved by an irresistible repulsion. The slight and momentary struggle
between them caused her hair, carelessly turned up and loosely pinned, to
come down. It fell all round her in a loose shock of unnatural colour.
Valentine's hands were strong, and Cuckoo soon felt that resistance was
useless. She let her body yield, and he drew her in front of the glass
that stood over the mantelpiece. Pushing back the table behind them, he
made her stand still in the unwinking glare of the three gas-jets, which
she had herself turned up earlier in the evening.
"Look there!" he cried; "look at yourself well! How can you have power
over anybody?"
Their two faces, set close together as in a frame, stared at them from
the mirror, and Cuckoo--forced to obedience--examined them as if indeed
they were a picture. She saw the man's face, fair, beautiful, refined,
triumphant, full of the courage that is based upon experience of itself
and of its deeds and possibilities, full of a strange excitement that
filled the face with amazingly vivid expression. She saw the bright blue
eyes gazing at her, the red lips of the mouth curved in a smile.
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