Chapter 15For a moment, as Nerina met the Marquis’s dark lustful eyes, she felt the room swim around her dizzily and she knew that in another second her self-control would snap and she would run screaming from wall to wall in a vain effort to escape.
Then, even as her own weakness and peril flashed through her mind like a streak of lightning through a darkened sky, she knew that only by keeping her head and by an almost superhuman effort at rigid control could she save herself from the danger that threatened her.
It was perhaps the expression of astonishment on the Marquis’s face that helped her more than anything else to realise that she must take the initiative.
For what seemed to her a long time they stood gazing at each other and then jerkily, almost as if she was a puppet propelled
