The sense that she had fallen into a trap, notwithstanding all the
perfect simulation of Mrs. Durlacher's apparently genuine surprise,
swept chillingly through her blood. When once she became conscious
again of her bodily existence, felt the pulses throbbing in her
forehead, and knew that her heart was beating like the muffled
rattling of a kettledrum, she shuddered. Traill, she knew, had
nothing to do with it. If that thought, with the force of conviction
behind it, had entered her mind, she would have fled; driven with
the curling lash of fear--fear of life itself, fear of everything.
But she did not even contemplate it. It was the woman her instinct
mistrusted. She had realized her an enemy before; now, in the purring
tones of her tardy welcome, she recognized in her an enemy whose
aggressiveness is active, brought into definite play.
Where lay the trap and how it had been set, she could not conjecture;
but that a trap was there, she was convinced, and as she had walked
unthinkingly into that room, so she had unsuspiciously fallen into
the cruel iron jaws of the relentless machine. She sat in that chair
by the fire, gazing at the hissing logs as they spat at the flames
that licked them, and felt all the powerlessness, all the impotence,
that the frightened rabbit knows when it is caught in the device of
the snarer.
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