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 than he regretted her resentment.

“How far would you go to prove your gratitude?” he continued.

“I do not know,” said Leam, the weary sigh repeated.

“Would you marry for gratitude where you did not love?”

“No,” she answered in a low voice.

“Would you marry for fear, then, if not for gratitude or love?  If you were in the power of a man, would you marry that man to save yourself from all chance of betrayal?  I have known women who would.  Are you one of them?”

Again he passed his hands over her head and across and down her face.  His voice sounded sweet and soft as honey:  it was like a cradle-song to a tired child.  Leam’s eyes drooped heavily.  A mist seemed stealing up before her through which everything was transformed—­by which the sunshine became as a golden web wherein she was entangled, and the shadows as lines of the net that held her—­where the songs of the birds melted into distant harmonies echoing the sleepy sweetness of that soft compelling voice, and where the earth was no longer solid, but a billowy cloud whereon she floated rather than stood.  A strange sense of isolation possessed her.  It was as if she were alone in the universe, with some all-powerful spirit who was questioning her of the secret things of life, and whose questions she must answer.  Mr. Gryce was not the tenant of Lionnet, as the world knew him, but a mild yet awful god, in whose presence she stood revealed, and who was reading her soul, like her past, through and through.  She was before him there as a criminal before a judge—­discovered, powerless—­and all attempt at concealment was at an end.