He could not help but notice how unusually beautiful the girl was.

“What a chance of fortune this is for me, but it does not follow, even though she was madly in love with my cousin, that she will hold me in the same favor.  But I’ll stand none of her airs.  I’ll show her right from the start that I’m the boss, and see how that will strike her fancy.  There’ll be a terrible time when she comes to—­screams, shrieks of anger, that will call everybody to the door.”

He turned on his heel and walked over to the mantel, where the innkeeper had deposited the bottle and the glass.

He poured out a heavy draught and drank it at a single swallow.  This was followed by another and yet another.

“Ah, there’s nothing like bracing oneself up for a scene like this,” he muttered, with a sardonic laugh.

The liquor seemed to turn the blood in his veins to fire and set his heart in a glow.  He laughed aloud.  In that moment he felt as rich as a king, and as diabolical as Satan himself.

He was nerved for any emergency; he was the girl’s lord and master, her wedded husband.  She would be made to understand that fact with little ceremony.

He threw himself down in a chair, where he could watch her, and waited results, and each instant he sat there the fumes of the brandy rose higher and higher, until it reached his brain.

    “There was a laughing devil in his sneer
    That woke emotions of both hate and fear;
    And where his scowl of fierceness darkly fell,
    Hope, withering, fled and mercy sighed farewell.”

Yes, a few short moments and consciousness would return to the girl—­the stormy scene would begin.

Would the sharp eyes of love detect the difference between himself and Lester Armstrong, whom he was impersonating?  He knew every tone of his cousin’s voice so perfectly that he would have little difficulty in imitating that.  The more closely he watched the girl, the more conscious he became of her wonderful beauty, and his heart gave a bound of triumph.

It was worth a struggle, after all, to have as beautiful a bride as she, even though she hated him.

“If I watch her much longer it will end by my being madly in love with her,” he mused.  “I never could withstand a pretty face.”

The wild winds moaned like demons outside.  The bare branches writhed and twisted in the storm, tapping weirdly against the window pane.  The room grew warmer as the fire took hold of the logs in the grate, and with the heat the fumes of the brandy rose into his brain, and with it his color heightened, his cheeks and lips were flushed and his eyes scintillating.  With unsteady hand he reached out for the flask again, uncorked it, and without taking the trouble to reach for the glass, placed the bottle to his lips and drained it to the dregs.

“She is awaking,” he muttered, with a maudlin laugh, and springing from his seat with unsteady steps, he crossed the room and stood by the couch, looking down eagerly into the beautiful white face upon the pillow.  As if impelled by that steady, serpentine, fiery glance, the girl moaned uneasily.