He halted before her, looking down into her face with a curious intentness.  “You really believe that?” he said.  “You can’t conceive such a thing as this—­utterly and inexcusably wrong as I admit it to be—­you can’t conceive it to have been done from a motive of mercy?”

She shrank away from him as from a thing unclean.  The impulse to escape was still strong upon her, urging her to a wild resistance.  She met the pitiless eyes that watched her like a creature at bay.  “You never did anything in mercy yet!” she said.  “There is no mercy in you!”

“Indeed!” he said, and uttered a brief, grating laugh that made her shudder.  “In that case, I’m afraid I can’t help you any further.  I’m at the end of my resources.”

Olga drew herself together with a supreme effort, mustering all her strength.  “It is the end of everything,” she said.  “I can never marry you now.  I never want to see you again.”

He met her look implacably, with eyes that seemed to beat down her own.  “I have told you that I won’t submit to that,” he said.

She caught her breath with a convulsive movement of protest.  Perhaps never before had she so clearly realized the ruthlessness of the man and his strength.

“I can’t help it,” she said.  “I can never marry you.  Even if—­if we had been married, I could not have stayed with you—­after this.”

She saw his mouth harden to cruelty at her words, and instinctively she drew back from him; but in the same instant his hands closed upon her wrists and she was a captive.

“Doesn’t it occur to you,” he said, “that you are bound to me in honour—­unless I set you free?”

He spoke with the utmost calmness, but her heart misgave her.  She saw herself at his mercy, an impotent prisoner striving against him, vainly beating out her will against the iron of his.  In that moment she realized fully that not by strength could she prevail, and desperately she began to plead.

“But you will set me free, Max!  You wouldn’t—­you couldn’t—­hold me against my will!”

“Couldn’t I?” said Max, and grimly smiled.  “There is nothing whatever that I couldn’t do with you, Olga,—­with—­or without—­your will.”

She shivered sharply and uncontrollably, not attempting to contradict him.

“And that being so,” he said, “it is not my intention to set you free.  There is no earthly reason why you should not marry me, and therefore I hold you to your engagement.  That is quite understood, is it?”

His hold tightened upon her.  She saw that he meant every word, and her heart died within her.  Her strength was running out swiftly, swiftly.  Very soon it would be utterly gone.  She cast a desperate glance upwards, and made one last supreme effort.  “But, Max,” she pleaded, “I thought you loved me.”

His face was set in iron lines, but she thought it softened ever so slightly at her words.  Had she pierced the one vulnerable point in his armour at last?  She wondered, scarcely daring to hope.