Before she could reply or even think, other hands than his were busy with her.  A folded cloth was whipped over the lower half of her face, sealing her lips, and knotted at the nape of her neck.  Stout arms clipped her knees and swung 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 on the farther side.

For an interminable time, while the ponderous fabric rocked and toppled, threatening very instant to crash upon its side, the rear wheels spun madly and the chain-bound tires tore in vain at greasy road metal.