for his own ends,
would take so much and give so little. In truth, as time had gone on,
men who had been his companions, and had indeed small consciences to
boast of, had begun to draw off a little from him, and frequent his
company less. He chose to tell himself that this was because he had
squandered his fortune and was less good company, being pursued by
creditors and haunted by debts; but though there was somewhat in this,
perchance 'twas not the entire truth.

"By Gad!" said one over his cups, "there are things even a rake-hell
fellow like me cannot do; but he does them, and seems not to know that
they are to his discredit."

There had been a time when without this woman's beauty he might have
lived--indeed, he had left it of his own free vicious will; but in these
days, when his fortunes had changed and she represented all that he stood
most desperately in need of, her beauty drove him mad. In his haunting
of her, as he followed her from place to place, his passion grew day by
day, and all the more gained strength and fierceness because it was so
mixed with hate. He tossed upon his bed at night and cursed her; he
remembered the wild past, and the memory all but drove him to delirium.
He knew of what stern stuff she was made, and that even if her love had
died, she would have held to her compact like grim death, even while
loathing him. And he had cast all this aside in one mad moment of boyish
cupidity and folly; and now that she was so radiant and entrancing a
thing, and wealth, and splendour, and rank, and luxury lay in the hollow
of her hand, she fixed her beauteous devil's eyes upon him with a scorn
in their black depths which seemed to burn like fires of hell.

The great brute who dashed, and plunged, and pranced beneath her seemed
to have sworn to conquer her as he had sworn himself; but let him plunge
and kick as he would, there was no quailing in her eye, she sat like a
creature who was superhuman, and her hand was iron, her wrist was steel.
She held him so that he could not do his worst without such pain as would
drive him mad; she lashed him, and rained on him such blows as almost
made him blind. Once at the very worst, Devil dancing near him, she
looked down from his back into John Oxon's face, and he cursed aloud, her
eye so told him his own story and hers. In those days their souls met in
such combat as it seemed must end in murder itself.

"You will not conquer him," he said to her one morn