I seized it without an instant of hesitation.

"How could I resist you ?" I said, and heard my own whisper with a kind of amazement at its emotion.

I raised her hand.
It was very cold and she seemed to have no thought of resistance; but before it touched my lips something like a panic of prudence had overcome me.

I did not know what it would lead to--and I remembered that I did not even know who she was.

From the beginning she had struck me as sinister and now, in the obscurity, her silence and her coldness seemed to be a passive threatening of unknown entanglement.