d in spirit, never--never again!"

"What do you mean?" he said, his arms tightening about her.

She kept her face averted. "I mean--that some forms of torture are worse
than death. If it comes to that--if you compel me--I shall choose
death."

"Stella!" He let her go so suddenly that she nearly fell. The utterance
of her name was as a cry wrung from him by sheer agony. He turned from
her with his hands over his face. "My God!" he said, and again almost
inarticulately, "My--God!"

The low utterance pierced her, yet she stood motionless, her hands
gripped hard together. He had forced the words from her, and they were
past recall. Nor would she have recalled them, had she been able, for it
seemed to her that her love had become an evil thing, and her whole
being shrank from it in a species of horrified abhorrence, even though
she could not cast it out.

He had turned towards the window, and she watched him, her heart beating
in slow, hard strokes with a sound like a distant drum. Would he go?
Would he remain? She almost prayed aloud that he would go.

But he did not. Very suddenly he turned and strode back to her. There
was purpose in every line of him, but there was no longer any violence.

He halted before her. "Stella," he said, and his voice was perfectly
steady and controlled, "do you think you are being altogether fair to
me?"

She wrung her clasped hands. She could not answer him.

He took them into his own very quietly. "Just look me in the face for a
minute!" he said.

She yearned to disobey, but she could not. Dumbly she raised her eyes to
his.

He waited a moment, very still and composed. Then he spoke. "Stella, I
swear to you--and I call God to witness--that I did not kill Ralph
Dacre."

A dreadful shiver went through her at the bald brief words. She felt, as
Tommy had felt a little earlier, physically sick. The beating of her
heart was getting slower and slower. She wondered if presently it would
stop.

"Do you believe me?" he said, still holding her eyes with his, still
clasping her icy hands firmly between his own.

She forced herself to speak before that horrible sense of nausea
overcame her. "Perhaps--David--said the same thing--about Uriah the
Hittite."

His face changed a little, but it was a change she could not have
defined. His eyes remained inscrutably fixed upon hers. They seemed to
enchain her quivering soul.

"No," he said quietly. "Nor did I employ any one else to do it."