order to hold her there until further notice. The attempt to assassinate
him would serve as excuse enough for a proceeding even more highhanded
than this. Her relatives could scarce appeal to the law, since the law
would then step in and send her to the penitentiary. He could use her
position as a hostage to force her stiff-necked father to come to terms.

But it was characteristic of the man that his reason for keeping her
was, after all, less the advantage he might gain by it than the pleasure
he found in tormenting her and her family. To this instinct of the
jungle beast was added the interest she had inspired in him. Untaught of
life she was, no doubt, a child of the desert, in some ways primitive as
Eve; but he perceived in her the capacity for deep feeling, for passion,
for that kind of fierce, dauntless endurance it is given some women to
possess.

Miss Weaver took charge of the comfort of her guest. Her manner showed
severe disapproval of this girl so lost to the feelings of her sex as to
have attempted murder. That she was young and pretty made matters worse.
Alice Weaver always had worshipped her brother, by the law of opposites
perhaps. She was as drab and respectable as Boston. All her tastes ran
to humdrum monotony. But turbulent, lawless Buck, the brother whom she
had brought up after the death of their mother, held her heart in the
hollow of his hard, careless hand.

"Have you had everything you wish?" she would ask Phyllis in a frigid
voice.

"I want to be taken home."

"You should have thought of that before you did the dreadful thing you