re may be women
strong enough to set the world at defiance. But you are not one of
them--and you know it. You have shown it to yourself again and again in
the last forty-eight hours. Your bringing-up has kept you a child in real
knowledge of real life, as distinguished from the life in that fashionable
hothouse. If you tried to assert your so-called independence, you would be
the easy prey of a scoundrel or scoundrels. When I, who have lived in the
thick of the fight all my life, who have learned by many a surprise and
defeat never to sleep except with the sword and gun in hand, and one eye
open--when I have been trapped as Roebuck and Langdon have just trapped
me--what chance would a woman like you have?"

She did not answer or change expression.

"Is what I say reasonable or unreasonable?" I asked gently.

"Reasonable--from _your_ standpoint," she said.

She gazed out into the moonlight, up into the sky. And at the look in her
face, the primeval savage in me strained to close round that slender white
throat of hers and crush and crush until it had killed in her the thought
of that other man which was transforming her from marble to flesh that
glowed and blood that surged. I pushed back my chair with a sudden noise;
by the way she trembled I gaged how tense her nerves must be. I rose and,
in a fairly calm tone, said: "We understand each other?"

"Yes," she answered. "As before."

I ignored this. "Think it over, Anita," I urged--she seemed to me so like a
sweet, spoiled child again. I longed to go straight at her about that other
man. I stood for a moment with Tom Langdon's name on my lips, but I could
not trust myself. I went away to my own rooms.

I thrust thoughts of her from my mind. I spent the night gnawing upon the
ropes with which Mowbray Langdon and Roebuck had bound me, hand and foot. I
now saw they were ropes of steel--and it had long been broad day before I
found that weak strand which is in every rope of human make.

XXVI. THE WEAK STRAND

No sane creature, not even a sane bulldog, will fight simply from love of
fighting. When a man is attacked, he may be sure he has excited either fear
or cupidity, or both. As far as I could see, it was absurd that cupidity
was inciting Langdon and Roebuck against me. I hadn't enough to tempt them.
Thus, I was forced to conclude that I must possess a strength of which I
was unaware, and which stirred even Roebuck's fears. But what could it be?

Besides La