THE SUPERB MOMENT
at the capture of the horse. He had encountered them, and they had passed. She had forgiven him, but this brutal dissension of the will had sprung upon him unawares. He couldn't understand it. It was a cruel trick that had transformed her, a panting creature with challenging eyes. "Are you going to let him go?"
The metallic tone calling him up to judgment rasped on his tight nerves. "No!" he almost shouted the words. "I'm going to break him—do you understand?—to break him!"
She closed her fingers on the light whip she still held, as if it were as much as she could do to keep from bringing it down on his head. Her face was bleak. The high bridge of the nose looked higher than usual and sharp. All the pretty mirage of tenderness had melted, all vision of themselves as lovely bodies invested with radiant intentions. They looked at each other, and knew each other over again from the beginning, people of jealous conceit, without charity, with passionate wills for their own predilections, born enemies, who had thought themselves lovers. Her lips tightened without a smile, showed a flash of teeth. "You can't!" she said.
The words struck him like a flat palm in the face. "Don't you teach me what I can or can't do," he said hardily. "I know my business, and it isn't a
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