ure of the reward!"

Hodges leaned forward eagerly, as if about to speak, but she interrupted
him.

"Listen!" she cried, a fire beginning to burn through the whiteness
of her cheeks. "It was you who urged him to come up here when, through
misfortune, we lost our little home down in Marion. You offered him
work, and he accepted it, believing you a friend. He still thought you
a friend when I knew that you were a traitor, planning and scheming
to wreck his life, and mine. He would not listen when I spoke to him,
without arousing his suspicions, of my abhorrence of you. He trusted
you. He was ready to fight for you. And you--you--"

In her excitement the young woman's hands gripped the edges of the
table. For a few moments her breath seemed to choke her, and then she
continued, her voice trembling with passion.

"And you--you followed me about like a serpent, making every hour of
my life one of misery, because he believed in you, and I dared not tell
him. So I kept it from him--until that night you came to our cabin when
he was away, and dared to take me in your arms, to kiss me, and I--I
told him then, and he hunted you down and would have killed you if
there hadn't been others near to give you help. My God, I love him more
because of that! But I was wrong. I should have killed you!"

She stopped, her breath breaking in a sob.

With a sudden movement Hodges sprang from his chair and came toward her,
his face flushed, his lips smiling; but, quicker than he, Thorpe's wife
was upon her feet, and from his prison Philip saw the rapid rising and
falling of her bosom, the threatening fire in her beautiful eyes as she
faced him.

"Ah, but you are beautiful!" he heard the man say.

With a cry, in which there was mingled all the passion and gloating joy
of triumph, Hodges caught her in his arms. In that moment every vein in
Philip's body seemed flooded with fire. He saw the woman's face again,
now tense and white in an agony of terror, saw her struggle to free
herself, heard the smothered cry that fell from her lips. For the first
time he strained to free himself, to cry out through the thick bandage
that gagged him. The box trembled. His mightiest effort almost sent it
crashing to the floor. Sweating, powerless, he looked again through the
narrow slit. In the struggle the woman's hair had loosened, and tumbled
now in shining masses down her back. Her hands were gripping at Hodges'
throat. Then one of them crept down to he