n fire again in an instant.

"Scruples!" he repeated. "YOUR scruples! It is rather late in the day
for you to be scrupulous. I should have thought you had got over all
weakness of that sort, when you made a virtue of necessity by marrying
me."

The instant he spoke those words, Laura threw down the pen--looked at
him with an expression in her eyes which, throughout all my experience
of her, I had never seen in them before, and turned her back on him in
dead silence.

This strong expression of the most open and the most bitter contempt
was so entirely unlike herself, so utterly out of her character, that
it silenced us all. There was something hidden, beyond a doubt, under
the mere surface-brutality of the words which her husband had just
addressed to her. There was some lurking insult beneath them, of which
I was wholly ignorant, but which had left the mark of its profanation
so plainly on her face that even a stranger might have seen it.

The Count, who was no stranger, saw it as distinctly as I did. When I
left my chair to join Laura, I heard him whisper under his breath to
Sir Percival, "You idiot!"

Laura walked before me to the door as I advanced, and at the same time
her husband spoke to her once more.

"You positively refuse, then, to give me your signature?" he said, in
the altered tone of a man who was conscious that he had let his own
licence of language seriously injure him.

"After what you have just said to me," she replied firmly, "I refuse my
signature until I have read every line in that parchment from the first
word to the last. Come away, Marian, we have remained here long enough."

"One moment!" interposed the Count before Sir Percival could speak
again--"one moment, Lady Glyde, I implore you!"

Laura would have left the room without noticing him, but I stopped her.

"Don't make an enemy of the Count!" I whispered. "Whatever you do,
don't make an enemy of the Count!"

She yielded to me. I closed the door again, and we stood near it
waiting. Sir Percival sat down at the table, with his elbow on the
folded parchment, and his head resting on his clenched fist. The Count
stood between us--master of the dreadful position in which we were
placed, as he was master of everything else.

"Lady Glyde," he said, with a gentleness which seemed to address itself
to our forlorn situation instead of to ourselves, "pray pardon me if I
venture to offer one suggestion, and pray believe that I speak