Roger made a sudden, violent movement.

“Who is it?  She has never told me who it was.  I suppose it’s that confounded cad who painted her portrait—­Maryon Rooke?”

Barry smile a little.

“No,” he answered.  “The man she loves is Peter Mallory.”

“Mallory!”—­in blank astonishment.  Then, swiftly and with a gleam of triumph in his eyes:  “But he’s married!”

“His wife has just died—­out in India.”

There was a long pause.  Then: 

“So that’s why you came?” sneered Roger.  “Well, you can tell Nan that she won’t marry Peter Mallory with my consent.  I’ll never set her free to be another man’s wife”—­his dangerous temper rising again.  “There’s only one thing left to me in the world, and that’s Nan.  And I’ll have her!”

“Is that your final decision?” asked Barry.  He was beginning to recognise the hopelessness of any effort to turn or influence the man.

“Yes”—­with a snarl.  “Tell Nan”—­derisively—­“that I shall expect my truly devoted fiancee here this afternoon.”

CHAPTER XXXVII

THE GREAT HEALER

It was late in the afternoon when the Mallow car once more purred up to the door of Trenby Hall and Nan descended from it.  She was looking very pale, her face like a delicate white cameo beneath the shadow of her hat, while the clinging black of her gown accentuated the slender lines—­too slender, now—­of her figure.  She had not yet discarded her mourning for Lord St. John, but in any case she would have felt that gay colours could have no part in to-day.

Kitty had told her of Barry’s interview with Trenby and of its utter futility, and, although Nan had been prepared to sacrifice her whole existence to the man who had suffered so terrible an injury, she was bitterly disappointed that he proposed exacting it from her as a right rather than accepting it as a free gift.

If for once he could have shown himself generous and offered to give her back her freedom—­an offer she would have refused to accept—­how much the fact that each of them had been willing to make a sacrifice might have helped to sweeten their married life!  Instead, Roger had forced upon her the realisation that he was unchanged—­still the same arrogant “man with the club” that he had always been, insisting on his own way, either by brute force or by the despotism of a moral obligation which was equally compelling.

But these thoughts fled—­driven away by a rush of overwhelming sympathy—­when her eyes fell on the great, impotent hulk of a man who lay propped up against his pillows.  A nurse slipped past her in the doorway and paused to whisper, as she went: 

“Don’t stay too long.  He’s run down a lot since this morning.  I begged him not to see any more visitors to-day, but he insisted upon seeing you.”

The nurse recalled very vividly the picture of her patient when she had endeavoured to dissuade him from this second interview—­his white, rather drawn face and the eyes which blazed feverishly at her beneath their penthouse brows.