s clutches?"

"Yes, I do."

Miriam threw back her head and laughed. "You funny little thing! You're
rather sweet. George hasn't a clutch strong enough to hold me. You can
be sure of that."

She was herself so certain that she waylaid him on the moor next day,
but to her amazement he did not answer her smile of greeting and passed
on without a word.

"George!" she called after him.

"Well?" He looked beyond her at the place where green moor met blue sky:
he felt he had done with her, and Helen's trust had taken all the
sweetness from revenge.

"Aren't you going to say good-morning? I came on purpose to see you."

"You needn't trouble," he said and, stealing a look at her, he weakened.

"But I need." He was wavering, she knew, and her mouth and eyes promised
laughter, her body seemed to sway towards him.

"I want--I want to forgive you, George."

"Well, I'm--"

"Yes, you are, no doubt, but I don't want to be, so I forgive my
trespassers, and I've come to make friends."

"You've said that before."

"I've always meant it. Must I hold out my arm any longer?"

"No." She was too tempting for his strength. He took her by the
shoulders, looked greedily at her, saw the shrinking he had longed for
and pressed his mouth on hers. She gave a cry that made a bird start
from the heather, but he held her to him and felt her struggling with a
force that could not last, and in a minute she dropped against him as
helplessly as if she had been broken.

He turned her over on his arm. "You little devil!" he said, and kissed
her lips again.

Her face was white and still: she did not move and he could not guess
that behind the brows gathered as if she were in pain, her mind
ransacked her home for a weapon that might kill him, and saw the
carving-knife worn to a slip of steel that would glide into a man's body
without a sound. She meant to use it: she was kept quiet by that
determination, by the intensity of her horror for caresses that, unlike
those first ones in the larch-wood, marked her as a thing to be used and
thrown away.

She knew his thoughts of her, but she had her own amid a delirium of
hate, and when he released her, she was shaking from the effort of her
control.

"Now I've done with you," he said, and she heard him laugh as he went
away.

She longed to scream until the sky cracked with the noise, and she had
no knowledge of her journey home. She found herself sitting at the
dinner-table with Helen, and he