ung her off her feet, leaving her body helpless in Victor's tight
embrace. And despite her tardy recovery and efforts to struggle, she was
carried swiftly away, a dozen paces or so, then tumbled bodily in upon the
floor of a motor-car.

The door closed as she tried to pick herself up, the smooth purring of the
motor became a leonine roar while she was still on her knees, gears
clashed, and the car leaped with a jerk that drove her headlong against the
cushions of the seat. Then the dome light was switched on, and she saw
Victor with a bleak face sitting over her, an automatic pistol naked in his
hand.

"Get up!" he said, grimly, "and if there's any thought of fight left in
you, think better of it, remember your mother paid with her life the price
of defying me, and yours means even less to me. Up with you and sit quietly
beside me--do you hear?"

He lent her a hand that wrenched her arm brutally and wrung a cry which
Victor mocked as Sofia fell upon the seat and cringed back into the corner.

For perhaps thirty seconds, while the car raced away down the drive, he
continued to hold her in the venom of her sneer; then his gaze veered
sharply, and leaning over he switched off the light.

With the body of the car again the dwelling-place of darkness, objects
beyond its rain-gemmed glass--the heads of the Chinese maid and chauffeur,
the twin piers of the nearing gateway--attained dense relief against the
blue-white glare of two broad headlight beams, that of the limousine boring
through the gateway to intersect at right angles that of another car
approaching on the highroad but as yet hidden by the wall of the park.

In one breath and the same the lights of the second car swerved in toward
the gateway, and consternation seized hold of Sofia's intelligence and
wiped it clear of all coherence.

Already the strange lamps were staring blankly in between the piers--and
the momentum of Victor's car was too great to be arrested within the
distance. The girl cried out, but didn't know it, and crouched low; the
horn added a squawk of frenzy to a wild clamour of yells; all prefatory to
a scrunching, rending crash as, in the very mouth of the gateway, a front
fender of the incoming car ripped through the rear fender above which Sofia
was sitting. Thrown heavily against Victor, then instantly back to her
place, she felt the car, with brakes set fast, turn broadside to the road,
skid crabwise, and lurch sickeningly into the ditch o