d.

"Why should I answer you?" It was the last resort of her weakening will.

He betrayed no impatience.

"You will answer me for your sister's sake," he told her grimly.

"What do you mean? You will follow her?"

"I shall follow her."

"And bring her back?"

"Back here? No, certainly not."

"You will hurt her, bully her, terrify her!" The words were quick with
agitation.

He ignored them. "Tell me where she is."

She made a last effort.

"If I tell you--will you take me with you?"

"No," he said, "I will not."

"Then--then--" She was looking straight into those pitiless eyes. It
seemed she could not help herself. "I will tell you," she said at last.
"But you will be kind to her? You will remember how young she is, and
that--that you drove her to it?"

Her voice was piteous, her resistance was dead.

"I shall remember," he said very quietly, "one thing only."

"Yes?" she murmured. "Yes?"

"That she is my wife," he said, in the same level tone. "Now--answer me."

And because there was no longer any alternative course, she yielded.

Had he shown himself a raging demon she could have resisted him, and
rejoiced in it. But this man, with his rigid self-control, his unswerving
resolution, his deadly directness, dominated her irresistibly.

Without argument he had changed her point of view. Without argument or
protestation of any sort, he had convinced her that it was no passing
fancy of his that had prompted him to choose Nan for his wife. She had
vaguely suspected it before. Now she knew.

CHAPTER IX

It was very dark over the moors. The solitary lights of a cab crawling
almost at a foot pace along the lonely road shone like a will-o'-the-wisp
through the snow. It had been snowing for hours, steadily, thickly, and
the cold was intense. The dead heather by the roadside had long been
completely hidden under that ever-increasing load. It lay in great
billows of white wherever the carriage lamps revealed it, stretching away
into the darkness, an immense, untrodden desert, wrapped in a deathly
silence, more terrible than any sound.

It seemed to Nan, shivering inside that cheerless cab, as if the world
had stopped like a run-down watch, and that she alone, with her
melancholy equipage, retained in all that vast stillness the power to
move.

She wished heartily that she had permitted Jerry to come to the station
to meet her, but for some reason not wholly intelligible to herself she
had proh