eeping himself out of my way!"

She felt that she had compelled him to this response, and that he
would have liked to put it more brutally. As it was, there lurked a
sting in it which provoked her to reply.

"Did he hold the privilege of your proximity at so large a price?"

A smile of quiet irony accompanied the words. As it curved her lips
alluringly, Lord Hurdly felt himself touched with the sudden sense of
her powerful charm. No one else on earth would have dared to say this
to him, or anything remotely comparable with it. There was something
very piquant to his jaded palate in the flavor of this audacious
speech. Instead of scowling, therefore, he smiled.

"I have heard," he said, amiably, "that America was the land of the
free and the home of the brave, and certainly you seem to warrant one
in accepting that belief."

Bettina, a good deal relieved at this turn of affairs, took the
opportunity that the moment gave her to say, gravely:

"No; I do not consider myself free. I have bound myself, in my
marriage to you, and I have no intention or desire to forget the
duties which I owe you. But I tell you frankly, Lord Hurdly, that I
am not accustomed to either surveillance or tyranny, and I shall not
tamely submit to them. In the carrying out of this resolution, at
least, you will find that I can be brave."

She looked more than ordinarily beautiful as she stood erect before
him and said these words, and he had not gazed so fully into her eyes
for a long time. He had almost forgotten their magnetic loveliness.
At sight of them now his pulses beat quicker. A desire for the
mastery of this splendid creature returned to him with a force he
would not have believed possible.

"Bettina," he said, in a voice which showed an emotion most unusual
to him, "have you ever known what it was to love, I wonder?"

"Once--once only," she answered, a quaver in her voice and a sudden
suffusion of tears in her eyes. "I loved my mother. No one that ever
lived could have loved more truly and more ardently than I loved her;
but there it began and ended. I never deceived you as to that. I
promised you duty and good faith, and I have not failed in these. I
never shall so fail. But love, no! I haven't it to give."

She made a movement to go forward, and he stood aside and let her
pass him. She avoided meeting his gaze, and perhaps it was well that
she did. For slowly its expression changed. A look of hardness that
was almost signific