seized her arms between the shoulder and the
elbow in his strong, powerful grip, grasping them until his muscular
fingers seemed to sink into the flesh. Then, in a sudden access of rage,
he shook her to and fro, her slight form being as a lath in his hands.

"You tell me so?" he said. "You attempt to disobey me?"

He let go of her, and she sank to the ground.

"I'd kill you if I didn't hate you too much," he went on. "Get up and go
back to the house. When I am ready, I shall come again; and when I come,
I take him with me."

She heard his footsteps retreating through the clump of trees, and
waited as she was, half kneeling, half sitting, on the ground, where he
had left her. She felt her arms throbbing as the bruises formed where
his hands had gripped; her head was swimming and giddy from the shaking
he had given her; her heart was palpitating with fear and emotion; and
as she crouched to the ground, there came back to her the words she had
said to Ailleen. She had come to the place to think--and to pray!

The irony of it came to her in her helplessness and misery. Only a short
while before she had been flattering herself that, after an absence of
ten years, she might believe that the dark shadow which had so marred
her life had passed away for ever; that, after a period of ten years'
silence, she was never to hear again the voice of the man which held her
helpless and unresisting to do his bidding, to suffer whatever his
merciless hatred might dictate, to submit, silently and bitterly, to
anything that he should command. And even as the shattering of all those
hopes went on, leaving her trembling and unnerved, there came to her the
knowledge that with one effort she could snap the influence that he had
over her, could end for ever her thraldom to him. It looked so easy, so
simple, from her present position, and so awful. To speak, to tell the
world the great secret of her life, the maintenance of which had lain
between her and the chasm she, in her timidity, dare not look towards,
was to end this hold of terror, and, so it seemed to her, to shatter at
the same moment that to which she clung with all the instinct of her
very existence--the affection of her son.

That always appeared to her to be the price of her emancipation. Through
all the dark years of her blindness the solace had been in the love she
gave to him, and in the ideal sympathy with which she persuaded herself
he regarded her. Sometimes she thought w