oes not recommend itself to me. In short, I should
prefer--the mercy of the mob."

The man's brows met ferociously. His hands clenched. He almost looked
for the moment as though he would strike her. But she did not flinch
before him, and very slowly the tension passed. Yet his eyes shone
terribly upon her as a sword-blade that is flashed in the sunlight.

"A strange preference, mademoiselle," he remarked at length, turning to
pick up his riding-switch. "Possibly you may change your mind--before it
is too late."

"Never!" she answered proudly.

And Pierre Dumaresq laughed--a sudden, harsh laugh, and turned to go. It
was only what he had expected, after all, but it galled him none the
less. He uttered no threat of any sort; only at the door he stood for an
instant and looked back at her. And the woman's heart contracted within
her as though her blood had turned to ice.

II

When she was alone, when his departing footsteps had ceased to echo
along the corridor without, Mademoiselle Stephanie drew a long,
quivering breath and moved to a chair by the window. She sank into it
with the abandonment of a woman at the end of her strength, and sat
passive with closed eyes.

For three years now she had lived in this turbulent island of Maritas.
For three years she had watched discontent gradually merge into
rebellion and anarchy. And now she knew that at last the end was near.

Her stepfather, the Governor, held his post under the French Government,
but France at that time was too occupied with matters nearer home to
spare much attention for the little island in the Atlantic and its
seething unrest. De Rochefort was considered a capable man, and
certainly if treachery and cruelty could have upheld his authority he
would have maintained his ascendency without difficulty. But the
absinthe demon had gripped him with resistless strength, and all his
shrewdness had long since been drained away.

Day by day he plunged deeper into the vice that was destroying him, and
Stephanie could but stand by and watch the gradual gathering of a storm
that was bound to overwhelm them both.

There was no love between them. They were bound together by circumstance
alone. She had gone to the place to be with her dying mother, and had
remained there at that mother's request. Madame de Rochefort's belief in
her husband had never been shaken, and, dying, she had left her English
daughter in his care.

Stephanie had accepted a position