scarcely have effected her escape had she so desired, for
already a hand was on the door. She turned towards it with the roguish
smile still upon her lips.

Merryon was looking at her at the moment. She interested him far more
than the visitor, whom he guessed to be one of the subalterns. And so
looking, he saw the smile freeze upon her face to a mask-like
immobility. And very suddenly he remembered a man whom he had once seen
killed on a battlefield--killed instantaneously--while laughing at some
joke. The frozen mirth, the starting eyes, the awful vacancy where the
soul had been--he saw them all again in the face of his wife.

"Great heavens, Puck! What is it?" he said, and sprang to his feet.

In the same instant she turned with the movement of one tearing herself
free from an evil spell, and flung herself violently upon his breast.
"Oh, Billikins, save me--save me!" she cried, and broke into hysterical
sobbing.

His arms were about her in a second, sheltering her, sustaining her. His
eyes went beyond her to the open door.

A man was standing there--a bulky, broad-featured, coarse-lipped man
with keen black eyes that twinkled maliciously between thick lids, and a
black beard that only served to emphasize an immensely heavy under-jaw.
Merryon summed him up swiftly as a Portuguese American with more than a
dash of darker blood in his composition.

He entered the room in a fashion that was almost insulting. It was
evident that he was summing up Merryon also.

The latter waited for him, stiff with hostility, his arms still tightly
clasping Puck's slight, cowering form. He spoke as the stranger
advanced, in his voice a deep menace like the growl of an angry beast
protecting its own.

"Who are you? And what do you want?"

The stranger's lips parted, showing a gleam of strong white teeth. "My
name," he said, speaking in a peculiarly soft voice that somehow
reminded Merryon of the hiss of a reptile, "is Leo Vulcan. You have
heard of me? Perhaps not. I am better known in the Western Hemisphere.
You ask me what I want?" He raised a brown, hairy hand and pointed
straight at the girl in Merryon's arms. "I want--my wife!"

Puck's cry of anguish followed the announcement, and after it came
silence--a tense, hard-breathing silence, broken only by her long-drawn,
agonized sobbing.

Merryon's hold had tightened all unconsciously to a grip; and she was
clinging to him wildly, convulsively, as she had never clung before. H