and suspect that he
may be nearby. They start to search for him. Grant barely escapes,
with the bandits and conspirators in hot pursuit. He flees to Jetta,
hoping that they will be able to get away together: but he finds her
tied hand and foot in her room.

The door is tightly sealed.

And close behind him are his pursuers!

CHAPTER VIII

_Jetta's Defiance_

I must go back now to picture what befell Jetta that afternoon while I
was at Spawn's mine. It is not my purpose to becloud this narrative
with mystery. There was very little mystery about it to Jetta, and I
can reconstruct her viewpoint of the events from what she afterward
told me.

Jetta's room was in a wing of the house on the side near the pergola.
Her window and door looked out upon the patio. When I had
retired--that first night in Nareda--Spawn had gone to his daughter
and upbraided her for showing herself while he was giving me that
first midnight meal.

"You stay in your room: you have nothing to do with him. Hear me?"

"Yes, Father."

From her infancy he had dominated her; it never occurred to either of
them that she could disobey. And yet, this time she did; for no sooner
was he asleep that night than she came to my window as I have told.

This next day Jetta dutifully had kept herself secluded. She cooked
her own breakfast while I was at the Government House, and was again
out of sight by noon.

Jetta was nearly always alone. I can picture her sitting there within
the narrow walls of her little room. Boy's ragged garb. All possible
femininity stripped from her. Yet, within her, the woman's instincts
were struggling. She sewed a great deal, she since has told me, there
in the cloistered dimness. Making little dresses of silk and bits of
finery given her surreptitiously by the neighbor women. Gazing at
herself in them with the aid of a tiny mirror. Hiding them away, never
daring to wear them openly; until at intervals her father would raid
the room, find them and burn them in the kitchen incinerator.

"Instincts of Satan! By damn but I will get these woman's instincts
out of you, Jetta!"

* * * * *

And there were hours when she would try to read hidden books, and look
at pictures of the strange fairy world of the Highlands. She could
read and write a little: she had gone for a few years to the small
Nareda government school, and then been snatched from it by her
father.

When Spawn and I had finished