and resentment of the
whip with which he had dared to lash her.

"If Vanno were here he would kill you!" the strange something that was
not herself cried out in a voice that was not hers.

Angelo's face hardened as he looked down at her with a bitter contempt.

"So you would rejoice in bringing strife between brothers!" he said. "I
had not yet thought so badly of you as that. But there are such women.
It was almost incredible to me at first that you--in face a sweet young
girl--could have accepted Vanno's love without telling him about--your
past, and at least giving him the chance to choose. Now I begin to see
you in a different light."

"You see me in a false light," Mary said passionately. "You tortured
that out of me--about Vanno. I didn't mean it. I'd rather die this
moment than bring strife between you. I know he loves you dearly. But if
you loved him as well, you couldn't have spoken as you did to me. I too
am dear to him."

"It is because I love Vanno that I had to speak so," Angelo persisted,
not softening at all. "I am his elder brother. Soon, I fear, I shall be
the head of our house. It is my duty to protect him."

"Against me?"

"Against you--if you make it necessary."

"I told you and I tell you again," Mary cried in exasperation, "that I
have done nothing wrong. There's nothing in my 'past' to confess. If I
haven't talked much to Vanno about it, that's because there was so much
else to say."

"How old are you, Miss Grant?" Angelo put the question abruptly.

"Twenty-five," she replied without hesitation, though puzzled at the
seeming irrelevance.

"Ah! I happen to know that Vanno believes you to be under twenty."

"I never said so. I would have told him my age if I had thought of it."

"He spoke of you to me, before we met, as a 'child not yet past her
teens, and just out of a convent-school.' How long do you say it is
since you were a pupil at that convent, where I believe you admit having
been--St. Ursula-of-the-Lake, in Scotland?"

"It's almost four years since I was a pupil, but----" She checked
herself in haste. In another instant she would have said a thing which
might have opened the eyes of Marie's husband on some dim vision of the
truth.

"I will answer no more questions from you, Prince Della Robbia," she
said, with an almost stern dignity which had never been hers. Angelo
felt this, but it made him see her as a woman more dangerous to Vanno
than he had supposed, because it reve