ook after in
your absence?"

Meredith barely raised her eyes. Her pain was intense, but Thornton saw
only indifference and an unconscious insolence in the words, tone, and
languid glance.

Never before in his life had he been balked and defied and resented as
he was by the pretty creature before him. The devil rose in him--and
generally Thornton rode his devil with courage and control, but
suddenly it reared, and he was thrown!

"Do you know," he said--and he looked handsome and powerful in his white
clothes; he was splendidly correct in every detail--"there are times
when I think you forget that you are my wife."

"I try to." Like all quiet people Meredith could shatter one's poise at
times by her daring. She looked so small and defiant as she lay
there--so secure!

"Suppose I commanded you to come with me to-morrow? Made my rightful
demand after this hellish year--what would you do?"

Thornton's chin projected; his mouth smiled, not pleasantly, and his
eyes held Meredith's with a light that frightened her. She sat up.

"Of course I should refuse to go with you," she replied, "and I do not
acknowledge any rights of yours except those that I give you. You
apparently overlook the fact that--I make no claims."

"Claims?" Thornton laughed, and the sound had a dangerous note that
startled Meredith. "Claims? Good Lord! That's quaintly delicious. You
don't know men, my dear. It would be a deed of charity to--inform you.
Claims, indeed! You drove me, when you might have held me, and you talk
claims."

"I did not want to hold you--after I knew that you had never really been
mine." Meredith's words were shaken by an emotion beyond Thornton's
comprehension; they further aroused the brute in him.

"This comes of locks and bars!" he sneered, recalling Doris's
expression, "but, damn it all, unless you were more fool than most girls
you might have saved yourself."

To this Meredith made no reply, but she crouched on the couch and
gathered her knees in her arms as if clinging to the only support at her
disposal.

"See here!" Thornton bent forward and his eyes blazed. "I'm going to
give you a last chance. You'll come with me to-morrow and have done with
this infernal rot or I'll take the woman with me who has made life
possible, in the past, for you and me. What do you say?"

Horror and repulsion grew in Meredith's eyes. She went deadly white and
stretched her hands wide as if shielding herself from something
defiling