“Am I to understand,” she said with cold disdain, so much more effective to wound than hot passion, “that you are offering me your love?  Your—­love?”

For reply he nodded his head.  The scorn of her voice, in a sort of baleful hiss, sounded—­and felt—­like the lash of a whip.

“And you dared! you—­a savage—­a slave—­the basest thing in the world of vermin!  Take care!  I don’t value your worthless life more than I do that of a rat or a spider.  Don’t let me ever see your hideous face here again, or I shall rid the earth of you.”

As she was speaking, she had taken out her revolver and was pointing it at him.  In the immediate presence of death his impudence forsook him, and he made a weak effort to justify himself.  His speech was short, consisting of single words.  To Lady Arabella it sounded mere gibberish, but it was in his own dialect, and meant love, marriage, wife.  From the intonation of the words, she guessed, with her woman’s quick intuition, at their meaning; but she quite failed to follow, when, becoming more pressing, he continued to urge his suit in a mixture of the grossest animal passion and ridiculous threats.  He warned her that he knew she had tried to steal his master’s treasure, and that he had caught her in the act.  But if she would be his, he would share the treasure with her, and they could live in luxury in the African forests.  But if she refused, he would tell his master, who would flog and torture her and then give her to the police, who would kill her.

CHAPTER XIV—­BATTLE RENEWED

The consequences of that meeting in the dusk of Diana’s Grove were acute and far-reaching, and not only to the two engaged in it.  From Oolanga, this might have been expected by anyone who knew the character of the tropical African savage.  To such, there are two passions that are inexhaustible and insatiable—­vanity and that which they are pleased to call love.  Oolanga left the Grove with an absorbing hatred in his heart.  His lust and greed were afire, while his vanity had been wounded to the core.  Lady Arabella’s icy nature was not so deeply stirred, though she was in a seething passion.  More than ever she was set upon bringing Edgar Caswall to her feet.  The obstacles she had encountered, the insults she had endured, were only as fuel to the purpose of revenge which consumed her.

As she sought her own rooms in Diana’s Grove, she went over the whole subject again and again, always finding in the face of Lilla Watford a key to a problem which puzzled her—­the problem of a way to turn Caswall’s powers—­his very existence—­to aid her purpose.

When in her boudoir, she wrote a note, taking so much trouble over it that she destroyed, and rewrote, till her dainty waste-basket was half-full of torn sheets of notepaper.  When quite satisfied, she copied out the last sheet afresh, and then carefully burned all the spoiled fragments.  She put the copied note in an emblazoned envelope, and directed it to Edgar Caswall at Castra Regis.  This she sent off by one of her grooms.  The letter ran: