“Will you tell me what you mean?” she said in a low voice.

He turned round to her again.

“Why did you come here yourself?” he said.  “And at night?”

She was trembling.

“I had to come myself—­as soon as I knew.  I hoped to persuade you.”

“You thought,” he said mercilessly, “that, however I might treat others,
I could never resist you.”

“I hoped—­to persuade you,” she said again.

“By—­tempting—­me?” he said slowly.

She gave a great start.  “Mr. Field—­”

He put out a quiet hand, and laid it upon her bare arm.

“Wait a moment, please!  As I said before, I am not above temptation—­being human.  You take a very personal interest in Burleigh Wentworth, I think?”

She met his look with quivering eyelids.

“Yes,” she said.

“Are you engaged to him?” he pursued.

She winced in spite of herself.

“No.”

He raised his brows.

“You have refused him, then?”

Her face was burning.

“He hasn’t proposed to me—­yet,” she said.  “Perhaps he never will.”

“I see.”  His manner was relentless, his hold compelling.  “I will defend Burleigh Wentworth,” he said, “upon one condition.”

“What is that?” she whispered.

“That you marry me,” said Percival Field with his steady eyes upon her face.

She was trembling from head to foot.

“You—­you—­have never seen me before to-day,” she said.

“Yes, I have seen you,” he said, “several times.  I have known your face and figure by heart for a very long while.  I haven’t had the time to seek you out.  It seems to have been decreed that you should do that part.”

Was there cynicism in his voice?  It seemed so.  Yet his eyes never left her.  They held her by some electric attraction which she was powerless to break.

She looked at him, white to the lips.

“Are you—­in—­earnest?” she asked at last.

Again for an instant she saw his faint smile.

“Don’t you know the signs yet?” he said.  “Surely you have had ample opportunity to learn them!”

A tinge of colour crept beneath her pallor.

“No one ever proposed to me—­like this before,” she said.

His hand was still upon her arm.  It closed with a slow, remorseless pressure as he made quiet reply to her previous question.

“Yes.  I am in earnest.”

She flinched at last from the gaze of those merciless eyes.

“You ask the impossible,” she said.

“Then it is all the simpler for you to refuse,” he rejoined.

Her eyes were upon the hand that held her.  Did he know that its grasp had almost become a grip?  It was by that, and that alone, that she was made aware of something human—­or was it something bestial—­behind that legal mask?

Suddenly she straightened herself and faced him.  It cost her all the strength she had.