es. Childe
Harold, lifting his head from his cropping of the grass, looked after
the violently jerking figures and snorted slightly, snuffing with
dilated red nostrils. As a war horse scenting blood and battle, he was
excited.

When Mount Dunstan got his captive into the shed the blood which had
surged in Red Godwyn's veins was up and leaping. Anstruthers, his collar
held by a hand with fingers of iron, writhed about and turned a livid,
ghastly face upon his captor.

"You have twice my strength and half my age, you beast and devil!" he
foamed in a half shriek, and poured forth frightful blasphemies.

"That counts between man and man, but not between vermin and
executioner," gave back Mount Dunstan.

The heavy whip, flung upward, whistled down through the air, cutting
through cloth and linen as though it would cut through flesh to bone.

"By God!" shrieked the writhing thing he held, leaping like a man who
has been shot. "Don't do that again! DAMN you!" as the unswerving lash
cut down again--again.

What followed would not be good to describe. Betty through the open door
heard wild and awful things--and more than once a sound as if a dog were
howling.

When the thing was over, one of the two--his clothes cut to ribbons,
his torn white linen exposed, lay, a writhing, huddled worm, hiccoughing
frenzied sobs upon the earth in a corner of the cart-shed. The other man
stood over him, breathless and white, but singularly exalted.

"You won't want your horse to-night, because you can't use him," he
said. "I shall put Miss Vanderpoel's saddle upon him and ride with her
back to Stornham. You think you are cut to pieces, but you are not, and
you'll get over it. I'll ask you to mark, however, that if you open your
foul mouth to insinuate lies concerning either Lady Anstruthers or her
sister I will do this thing again in public some day--on the steps of
your club--and do it more thoroughly."

He walked into the cottage soon afterwards looking, to Betty
Vanderpoel's eyes, pale and exceptionally big, and also more a man than
it is often given even to the most virile male creature to look--and he
walked to the side of her resting place and stood there looking down.

"I thought I heard a dog howl," she said.

"You did hear a dog howl," he answered. He said no other word, and she
asked no further question. She knew what he had done, and he was well
aware that she knew it.

There was a long, strangely tense silence. The lig