“ Oh!” she said.
She covered her face with her hands, while Cothope looked at her with an expression between suspicion and impatience.
For some moments nobody moved. Then Cothope remarked that perhaps he’d better get her water.
As for me, I was filled with a new outrageous idea, begotten I scarcely know how from this incident, with its instant contacts and swift emotions, and that was that I must make love to and possess Beatrice. I see no particular reason why that thought should have come to me in that moment, but it did. I do not believe that before then I had thought of our relations in such terms at all. Suddenly, as I remember it, the factor of passion came. She crouched there, and I stood over her, and neither of us said a word. But it was just as though something had been shout
