knowledge, as he euphemistically termed his curiosity, was roused to
the utmost, and he was like a hunter who has struck an obscure
trail. He wished to follow this thing to the end, and to know in what
relations she and her old friend stood together--if Alick knew what
he, Mr. Gryce, knew now, and had offered to marry her notwithstanding;
and whether, if he had offered, Leam had refused or accepted.
Observation and induction were hurrying him very near the point. Her
changing color, her averted eyes, her effort to maintain the pride and
coldness which were as a rule maintained without effort, the spasm
of terror that had crossed her face when he had spoken of Alick's
fidelity, all confirmed him in his belief that he was on the right
track, and that the lines in her hand coincided with the facts of
her tragic life. Tragic indeed--one of those lives fated from the
beginning, doomed to sorrow and to crime like the Orestes, the
Oedipus, of old.

But if he was curious, he was compassionate: if he tortured her now,
it was that he might care for her hereafter. That hereafter would
come--he knew that--and then he would make himself her salvation.

He thought all this as he still watched her, Leam standing there like
a creature fascinated, longing to break the spell and escape, and
unable.

"Tell me," then said Mr. Gryce in a soft and crooning kind of voice,
coming nearer to her, "what do you think of gratitude?"

"Gratitude is good," said Leam slowly, in the manner of one whose
answer is a completed thesis.

"But how far?"

"I do not know what you mean," she answered with a weary sigh.

Again he smiled: it was a soft, sleepy, soothing kind of smile, that
was almost an opiate.

"You are not good at metaphysics?" he said, coming still nearer and
passing his short thick hands over her head carressingly.

"I am not good at anything," she answered dreamily.

"Yes, at many things--to answer me for one--but bad at dialectics."

"I do not understand your hard words," said Leam, her sense of injury
at being addressed in an unknown tongue rousing her from the torpor
creeping over her.

How much she wished that he would release her! She had no power to
leave him of her own free-will. A certain compelling something in
Mr. Gryce always forced her to do just as he wished--to answer his
questions, stay when he stopped, follow when he beckoned. She resented
in feeling, but she obeyed in fact; and he valued her obedience more