ed for the absence of a foot-warmer.
'In a little,' he said, 'we shall be in the land where your slightest
wish will be law.'

She dozed again and so missed the frontier post. When she woke the car
was slipping down the long curves of the Weiss valley, before it
narrows to the gorge through which it debouches on Grunewald.

'We are in Switzerland now,' she heard his voice say. It may have been
fancy, but it seemed to her that there was a new note in it. He spoke
to her with the assurance of possession. They were outside the country
of the Allies, and in a land where his web was thickly spread.

'Where do we stop tonight?' she asked timidly.

'I fear we cannot stop. Tonight also you must put up with the car. I
have a little errand to do on the way, which will delay us a few
minutes, and then we press on. Tomorrow, my fairest one, fatigue will
be ended.'

There was no mistake now about the note of possession in his voice.
Mary's heart began to beat fast and wild. The trap had closed down on
her and she saw the folly of her courage. It had delivered her bound
and gagged into the hands of one whom she loathed more deeply every
moment, whose proximity was less welcome than a snake's. She had to
bite hard on her lip to keep from screaming.

The weather had changed and it was snowing hard, the same storm that
had greeted us on the Col of the Swallows. The pace was slower now, and
Ivery grew restless. He looked frequently at his watch, and snatched
the speaking-tube to talk to the driver. Mary caught the word 'St
Anton'.

'Do we go by St Anton?' she found voice to ask.

'Yes,' he said shortly.

The word gave her the faintest glimmering of hope, for she knew that
Peter and I had lived at St Anton. She tried to look out of the blurred
window, but could see nothing except that the twilight was falling. She
begged for the road-map, and saw that so far as she could make out they
were still in the broad Grunewald valley and that to reach St Anton
they had to cross the low pass from the Staubthal. The snow was still
drifting thick and the car crawled.

Then she felt the rise as they mounted to the pass. Here the going was
bad, very different from the dry frost in which I had covered the same
road the night before. Moreover, there seemed to be curious obstacles.
Some careless wood-cart had dropped logs on the highway, and more than
once both Ivery and the chauffeur had to get out to shift them. In one
place there had been