Explore "The Spider" by Fergus Hume on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
There was a long pause, a sinister lull in the tempest of passion which was raging in that quiet, prosaic room. Gasping with impotent passion, Maunders lay, resting his head against the door, an obstacle which prevented the guilty woman from escaping. Not that she attempted to escape. With a deadly white face, with steady, cold, malignant eyes, like those of a snake, and with a contemptuous smile on her thin lips. The Spider, visible at last in all her brazen wickedness, stood defiantly at bay. Towton, with Ida clinging to his arm almost terrified out of her senses, stared aghast at the evil being who had been such a curse to many. The ominous silence was like the year-long moment before the bursting of a bomb.
Ida, with chattering teeth and trembling limbs, was the first to recover the use of her tongue; but she could scarcely form the words. "Oh, God! oh, God! " she whimpered, hiding her face on her lover's breast; "it's too awful. I never thought -- I never thought -- oh -- oh -- oh! " She broke down with a strange, hysterical, choking cry, and would have fallen to the ground but that the Colonel placed her gently in a near chair.