d without honour."

"But what words!" laughed Levasseur. "What heat and what foolishness!
You have not considered the alternative. When you do, you will not
persist in your refusal. You will not do that in any case. We have spurs
for the reluctant. And I warn you against giving me your parole under
stress, and afterwards playing me false. I shall know how to find and
punish you. Meanwhile, remember your sister's honour is in pawn to me.
Should you forget to return with the dowry, you will not consider it
unreasonable that I forget to marry her."

Levasseur's smiling eyes, intent upon the young man's face, saw the
horror that crept into his glance. M. d'Ogeron cast a wild glance at
mademoiselle, and observed the grey despair that had almost stamped the
beauty from her face. Disgust and fury swept across his countenance.

Then he braced himself and answered resolutely:

"No, you dog! A thousand times, no!"

"You are foolish to persist." Levasseur spoke without anger, with a
coldly mocking regret. His fingers had been busy tying knots in a length
of whipcord. He held it up. "You know this? It is a rosary of pain that
has wrought the conversion of many a stubborn heretic. It is capable
of screwing the eyes out of a man's head by way of helping him to see
reason. As you please."

He flung the length of knotted cord to one of the negroes, who in an
instant made it fast about the prisoner's brows. Then between cord and
cranium the black inserted a short length of metal, round and slender
as a pipe-stem. That done he rolled his eyes towards Levasseur, awaiting
the Captain's signal.

Levasseur considered his victim, and beheld him tense and braced, his
haggard face of a leaden hue, beads of perspiration glinting on his
pallid brow just beneath the whipcord.

Mademoiselle cried out, and would have risen: but her guards restrained
her, and she sank down again, moaning.

"I beg that you will spare yourself and your sister," said the Captain,
"by being reasonable. What, after all, is the sum I have named? To your
wealthy father a bagatelle. I repeat, I have been too modest. But since
I have said twenty thousand pieces of eight, twenty thousand pieces it
shall be."

"And for what, if you please, have you said twenty thousand pieces of
eight?"

In execrable French, but in a voice that was crisp and pleasant, seeming
to echo some of the mockery that had invested Levasseur's, that question
floated over their heads.

Star