mitive instincts. To a clear-headed
modern young woman of the most powerful class, he--her sister's
husband--was making threatening love as if he were a savage chief and
she a savage beauty of his tribe. All that concerned him was that he
should speak and she should hear--that he should show her he was the
stronger of the two.

"Are you QUITE mad?" she said.

"Not quite," he answered; "only three parts--but I am beyond my own
control. That is the best proof of what has happened to me. You are an
arrogant piece and you would defy me if you stood alone, but you don't,
and, by the Lord! I have reached a point where I will make use of every
lever I can lay my hand on--yourself, Rosalie, Ughtred, Ffolliott--the
whole lot of you!"

The thing which was hardest upon her was her knowledge of her own
strength--of what she might have allowed herself of flaming words and
instant action--but for the memory of Rosy's ghastly little face, as
it had looked when she cried out, "You must not think of me. Betty, go
home--go home!" She held the white desperation of it before her mental
vision and answered him even with a certain interested deliberateness.

"Do you know," she inquired, "that you are talking to me as though you
were the villain in the melodrama?"

"There is an advantage in that," he answered, with an unholy smile. "If
you repeat what I say, people will only think that you are indulging
in hysterical exaggeration. They don't believe in the existence of
melodrama in these days."

The cynical, absolute knowledge of this revealed so much that nerve was
required to face it with steadiness.

"True," she commented. "Now I think I understand."

"No, you don't," he burst forth. "You have spent your life standing on a
golden pedestal, being kowtowed to, and you imagine yourself immune from
difficulties because you think you can pay your way out of anything. But
you will find that you cannot pay your way out of this--or rather you
cannot pay Rosalie's way out of it."

"I shall not try. Go on," said the girl. "What I do not understand, you
must explain to me. Don't leave anything unsaid."

"Good God, what a woman you are!" he cried out bitterly. He had never
seen such beauty in his life as he saw in her as she stood with her
straight young body flat against the tree. It was not a matter of deep
colour of eye, or high spirit of profile--but of something which burned
him. Still as she was, she looked like a flame. She made him