“What?” He strode forward and caught her by the shoulders.  She was aware of a sudden hot blaze of anger in him that made her think of the squire.  He held her in a grip that was merciless.  “Do you know what you are saying?” he asked.

She tried to hold him from her, but he pressed her to him with a dominance that would not brook resistance.

“Do you?” he said.  “Do you?”

His face was terrible.  She felt the hard hammer of his heart against her own, and a sense of struggling against overwhelming odds came upon her.

She bowed her head against his shoulder.  “Oh, Dick!” she said.  “It is you—­who—­don’t—­know!”

His hold did not relax, and for a space he said no word, but stood breathing deeply as a man who faces some deadly peril.

He spoke at length, and in his voice was something she had never heard before—­something from which she shrank uncontrollably, as the victim shrinks from the branding-iron.

“And so you think you can leave me—­as lightly as Lady Joanna Farringmore left that man I went to see today?”

She lifted her head with a gasp.  “No!” she said.  “Oh, no! 
Not—­like that!”

His eyes pierced her with their appalling brightness.  “No, not quite like that,” he said, with awful grimness.  “There is a difference.  An engaged woman can cut the cable and be free without assistance.  A married woman needs a lover to help her!”

She shrank afresh from the scorching cynicism of his words.  “Dick!” she said.  “Have I asked for—­freedom?”

“You had better not ask!” he flashed back.  “You have gone too far already.  I tell you, Juliet, when you gave yourself to me it was irrevocable.  There’s no going back now.  You have got to put up with me—­whatever the cost.”

“Ah!” she whispered.

“Listen!” he said.  “This thing is going to make no difference between us—­no difference whatever.  You cared for me enough to marry me, and I am the same man now that I was then.  The man you have conjured up in your own mind as the writer of those books is nothing to me—­or to you now.  I am the man who wrote them—­and you belong to me.  And if you leave me—­well, I shall follow you—­and bring you back.”

His lips closed implacably upon the words; he held her as though challenging her to free herself.  But Juliet neither moved nor spoke.  She stood absolutely passive in his hold, waiting in utter silence.

He waited also, trying to read her face in the dimness, but seeing only a pale still mask.

At last:  “You understand me?” he said.

She bent her head.  “Yes—­I understand.”

He stood for a moment longer, then abruptly his hold tightened upon her.  She lifted her face then sharply, resisting him almost instinctively, and in that instant his passion burst its bonds.  He crushed her to him with sudden mastery, and, so compelling, he kissed her hotly, possessively, dominatingly, holding her lips with his own, till she strained against him no longer, but hung, burning and quivering, at his mercy.