Why the man should have any intentions against him, he
could not guess, except that he might be one of the madmen who have a
vendetta against the capitalist. Or was he a tool of Felix Marchand? It
did not seem possible, and yet if the man was penniless and an anarchist
maybe, there was the possibility. Or--the blood rushed to his face--or it
might be that the Gipsy's presence here, this display of devilish
antipathy, as though it were all part of the music, was due, somehow, to
Fleda Druse.
The music swelled to a swirling storm, crashed and flooded the feelings
with a sense of shipwreck and chaos, through which a voice seemed to
cry-the quiver and delicate shrillness of one isolated string--and then
fell a sudden silence, as though the end of all things had come; and on
the silence the trembling and attenuated note which had quivered on the
lonely string, rising, rising, piercing the infinite distance and sinking
into silence again.
In the pause which followed the Romany stood panting, his eyes fixed on
Ingolby with an evil exaltation which made him seem taller and bigger
than he was, but gave him, too, a look of debauchery like that on the
face of a satyr. Generations of unbridled emotion, of license of the
fields and the covert showed in his unguarded features.
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