me, for the sake of our former friendship,
I would ask you to bear with me."

"By all means!"

"I had no idea that you were in the hotel. About half an hour ago, on
the veranda, I opened an English letter which arrived this evening. The
news in it gave me great concern. Then I saw you appear, to my
astonishment, in the distance. I asked the hotel manager if it were
really you. He was about to send someone after you. An idea occurred to
me. I saw my opportunity--and I pursued you."

"And here I am, at your mercy!" said Daphne, with sudden sharpness. "You
have left me no choice. However, I am quite willing."

The voice was familiar yet strange. There was in it the indefinable
hardening and ageing which seemed to Boyson to have affected the whole
personality. What had happened to her? As he looked at her in the dim
light there rushed upon them both the memory of those three weeks by the
seaside years before, when he had fallen in love with her, and she had
first trifled with, and then repulsed him.

"I wished to ask you a question, in the name of our old friendship; and
because I have also become a friend--as you know--of your husband."

He felt, rather than saw, the start of anger in the woman beside him.

"Captain Boyson! I cannot defend myself, but I would ask you to
recognize ordinary courtesies. I have now no husband."

"Of your husband," he repeated, without hesitation, yet gently. "By the
law of England at least, which you accepted, and under which you became
a British subject, you are still the wife of Roger Barnes, and he has
done nothing whatever to forfeit his right to your wifely care. It is
indeed of him and of his present state that I beg to be allowed to speak
to you."

He heard a little laugh beside him--unsteady and hysterical.

"You beg for what you have already taken. I repeat, I am at your mercy.
An American subject, Captain Boyson, knows nothing of the law of
England. I have recovered my American citizenship, and the law of my
country has freed me from a degrading and disastrous marriage!"

"While Roger remains bound? Incapable, at the age of thirty, of marrying
again, unless he renounces his country--permanently debarred from home
and children!"

His pulse ran quick. It was a strange adventure, this, to which he had
committed himself!

"I have nothing to do with English law, nothing whatever! It is unjust,
monstrous. But that was no reason why I, too, should suffer!"

"No reason for p