rt she had played seemed to his
retrospective mind almost a wanton's part--for all that in name she was
his wife. And yet, underlying a certain irrepressible nausea, came the
reflection that, after all, her purpose had been to save his life. It
would have been a sweet thought, sweet enough to have overlaid that
other bitterness, had he not insisted upon setting it down entirely to
her gratitude and her sense of justice. She intended to repay the debt
in which she had stood to him since, at the risk of his own life
and fortune, he had rescued her brother from the clutches of the
Lord-Lieutenant at Taunton.

He sighed heavily as he thought of the results that had attended his
compulsory wedding of her. In the intensity of his passion, in
the blindness of his vanity, which made him confident--gloriously
confident--that did he make himself her husband, she herself would make
of him her lover before long, he had committed an unworthiness of which
it seemed he might never cleanse himself in life. There was but one
amend, as he had told her. Let him make it, and perhaps she would--out
of gratitude, if out of no other feeling--come to think more kindly
of him; and that night it seemed to him as he sat alone in that mean
chamber that it were a better and a sweeter thing to earn some measure
of her esteem by death than to continue in a life that inspired her
hatred and resentment. From which it will be seen how utterly he
disbelieved the protestations she had uttered in seeking to detain him.
They were--he was assured--a part of a scheme, a trick, to lull him
while Monmouth and his officers were being butchered. And she had gone
the length of saying she loved him! He regretted that, being as he was
convinced of its untruth. What cause had she to love him? She hated him,
and because she hated him she did not scruple to lie to him--once with
suggestions and this time with actual expression of affection--that she
might gain her ends: ends that concerned her brother and Sir Rowland
Blake. Sir Rowland Blake! The name was a very goad to his passion and
despair.

He rose from the table and took a turn in the room, moving noiselessly
in his stockinged feet. He felt the need of air and action; the
weariness of his flesh incurred in his long ride from London was cast
off or forgotten. He must go forth. He picked up his fine shoes of
Spanish leather, but as luck would have it--little though he guessed the
extent just then--he found them h