esires of that lower nature
to which it was bound.

"I will listen no more to vague threats," he said fiercely. "I have
paid a heavy enough price for you. I mean to enjoy my purchase. See,
here is the list--they are fairly trapped--a word from you and they are
safe--these impatient fools. Keep silence--and the knout, the mines,
the slow torturing death of Siberia, awaits them all. Now, once again--
your answer?"

He drew nearer--his eyes aflame--his arms outstretched.

Then a change, wild and fearful, as that of the tropical tornado to a
southern landscape, swept over that lovely form.

Her eyes flashed, her figure seemed to dilate. Slowly she raised her
arm and stretched it towards that brutal ravisher...

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Struggling, panting, tearing, as it were, against a power that bade him
hearken to that terrible answer, Julian Estcourt cried or seemed to cry
aloud in an agony of entreaty.

Then a rushing noise as of an unloosed torrent was in his ears; a dull,
confused pain beat like clanging hammers in his brain.

His eyes opened and he found himself, bathed in the cold sweat of more
than mortal terror, lying face downwards on the floor of his own
bedroom.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

In a blind, dazed fashion he struggled to his feet and rushed to the
window and let the cool night air blow over his face. Every limb was
trembling; he could not think with any clearness.

In some dim, unconscious fashion he groped for his watch, found it, and
looked at the time. A quarter-past one. Only an hour had passed--an
hour--and he felt as if centuries had swept over his head in the vivid
horrors of that awful dream.

"But it was only a dream," he cried aloud, drawing in deep panting
breaths of the pine-scented air. "Oh! thank God. Thank God, it was
only a dream!"

And he sank on his knees and sobbed like a child in the star-lit
solitude of the night.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

EFFECTS.

The next day, when Colonel Estcourt sent to know if the Princess Zairoff
would receive him, he was informed she was ill, and could see no one.

Feeling strangely disinclined for mere ordinary society, he ordered his
horse to be brought round and spent the greater portion of the day in
long, fierce gallops over the miles of stretching sand that framed in
the bay.

The sky was chill and grey; a cold wind blew fr