ed him to drink with me. I
told him that you had promised to become my wife. He raised his glass--I
can see him now. He told me, with a smile, that it was the anniversary
of the day on which you had promised to become his mistress!"

Louise shrank back.

"He told you that?"

John was on his feet. The fever was blazing once more.

"He told me that, face to face--told me that it was the anniversary of
the day on which you had consented to become his mistress!"

"And you?"

"If we had been alone," John answered simply, "I should have killed him.
I drove the words down his throat. I threw him back to the place he had
left, and hurt him rather badly, I'm afraid. Sophy took me home somehow,
and now I am here."

She leaned a little forward on the couch. She looked into his face
searchingly, anxiously, as if seeking for something she could not find.
His lips were set in hard, cold lines. The likeness to Stephen had never
been more apparent.

"Listen!" she said. "You are a Puritan. While I admire the splendid
self-restraint evolved from your creed, it is partly temperamental,
isn't it? I was brought up to see things differently, and I do see them
differently. Tell me, do you love me?"

The veins swelled for a moment upon his forehead, stood out like
whip-cord along the back of his hands, but of softening there was no
sign in his face.

"Love you?" he repeated. "You know it! Could I suffer the tortures of
the damned if I didn't? Could I come to you with a man's blood upon my
hands if I didn't? If the prince lives, it is simply the accident of
fate. I tell you that if we had been alone I should have driven the
breath out of his body. Love you!"

She rose slowly to her feet. She leaned with her elbow upon the
mantelpiece, and her face was hidden for a moment.

"Let me think!" she said. "I don't know what to say to you. I don't know
you, John. There isn't anything left of the John I loved. Let me look
again!"

She swung around.

"You speak of love," she went on suddenly. "Do you know what it is? Do
you know that loves reaches to the heavens, and can also touch the
nethermost depths of hell? If I throw myself on my knees before you now,
if I link my fingers around your neck, if I whisper to you that in the
days that were past before you came I had done things I would fain
forget, if I told you that from henceforth every second of my life was
yours, that my heart beat with yours by day and by night, that I had no
o