"Oh, why have you told me?" she said at last. "Why--why have you told
me?"

"Can't you guess?" said Hunt-Goring.

"No!" Yet her breath came sharply with the word. If she did not guess,
she feared.

He looked down at her for the first time unsmiling. "I have told you,"
he said, "that I mean to marry you, and--in keeping with the part of
villain which you have assigned to me--I don't much care what I do to
get you."

She met his look with all her quivering courage. "But what has this to
do with that?" she said.

She saw his face harden, become cruel. "Miss Campion is nothing to me,"
he said brutally. "Either you give me your most sacred promise to marry
me before the end of the year, or--I shall tell her the truth here and
now, as I have just told it to you."

She shrank as though he had struck her. "Oh, you couldn't!" she cried
out wildly. "You couldn't! No man could be such a fiend!"

He came a step nearer to her, and suddenly his eyes glowed with a fire
that scorched her to the soul. "You had better not tempt me!" he said.
"Or I may do that--and more also!"

She put her hands up to shield her face from his look, but he caught
them suddenly and savagely into his own, overbearing her resistance with