ou, and the least
you can do is to be straight with me.'

Alma raised her head with a quick, circuitous glance, then fixed her
eyes on the man's heated face, and spoke in an undertone: 'Please,
behave yourself, or I shall have to go away.

'Then you won't tell me? Very well. I chuck up the job. You can run the
show yourself.'

Alma had never looked for delicacy in Felix Dymes, and his motives had
from the first been legible to her, but this revelation of brutality
went beyond anything for which she was prepared. As she saw the man
move away, a feeling of helplessness and of dread overcame her anger.
She could not do without him. The only other man active on her behalf
was Cyrus Redgrave, and to seek Redgrave's help at such a juncture,
with the explanation that must necessarily be given, would mean
abandonment of her last scruple. Of course, the paragraph in the _West
End_ originated with him; since Dymes knew nothing about it, it could
have no other source. Slowly, but very completely, the man of wealth
and social influence had drawn his nets about her; at each meeting with
him she felt more perilously compromised; her airs of command served
merely to disguise defeat in the contest she had recklessly challenged.
Thrown upon herself, she feared Redgrave, shrank from the thought of
seeing him. Not that he had touched her heart or beguiled her senses;
she hated him for his success in the calculated scheme to which she had
consciously yielded step by step; but she was brought to the point of
regarding him as inseparable from her ambitious hopes. Till quite
recently her thought had been that, after using him to secure a
successful debut, she could wave him off, perhaps tell him in plain
words, with a smile of scorn, that they were quits. She now distrusted
her power to stand alone. To the hostility of such a man as
Dymes--certain, save at intolerable cost--she must be able to oppose a
higher influence. Between Dymes and Redgrave there was no hesitating on
whatever score. This advertisement in the fashionable and authoritative
weekly paper surpassed Dymes's scope; his savage jealousy was
sufficient proof of that. All she could do for the moment was to
temporise with her ignobler master, and the humiliation of such a
necessity seemed to poison her blood.

She rose, talked a little of she knew not what with she knew not whom,
and moved towards the hostess, by whom her enemy was sitting. A glance
sufficed. As soon as she ha