Suddenly an indescribable feeling of oppression seized her.  She looked away from the picture, and then, glancing around to speak to the duchess, she saw the edge of her dress disappearing through the hangings of the doorway, while between herself and her retreating hostess stood the stolid figure of the duke, with the most odious smile imaginable upon his horrid face.

With a flush of anger that made her temples throb, Nina realized that a dastardly trap had been sprung upon her.  To leave a young girl even for a moment unchaperoned was against the strictest rule of Italian propriety.  The duchess had brought her all this distance on purpose to leave her with the villainous duke—­in a situation that, should it become known, would so compromise an Italian girl that there would be no place for her in the social system of her world afterward outside of a convent.  Her marriage with the duke would be almost inevitable.

Determined to give no evidence of the terror that gripped her, with the most fearless air she could assume she attempted to pass the duke; but he blocked her way so that her manoeuvres came down to the indignity of a game of blind man’s buff.  Nina held her head very high and looked straight at her tormentor.  “Please allow me to pass.”  She tried hard to speak quietly and to keep the tremulousness out of her voice.

For answer Scorpa quickly closed the intervening distance between them, and the next thing she knew the grasp of his thick, hot hands burned through the sleeve of her coat, and his face was thrust near to her own.  In a frenzy of fury she wrenched herself free, and without thought or even consciousness of what she was doing, she struck him full in the face.

Instead of recoiling, he caught and pinned her arms in a grip like a vice.  “Ah, ha, so that is the mettle you are made of, is it, you little fiend!  Don’t think that I mind your fury—­you will be a wife after my own heart when I have tamed you!  I am a man of my word—­I said I would marry you, and I will!  Not many men would want to marry a woman of your temper, but you suit me!”

In her horror Nina felt her throat grow dry.  She stared at the thick, red, cruel, animal lips of the man with a loathing that almost paralyzed her power to move; while his hands pressed numbingly into the flesh of her arms.

“Let me go!  Do you hear”—­her voice shook with fright and rage—­“let me go!  At once!  You coward!  You beast!”

And like a beast he snarled his answer:  “Scream all you please!  You could not be heard if you had a throat of brass!” Then mockingly he sneered, “Come, won’t you dance with me, as you did with the pretty Giovanni?  You had his arms around you lovingly enough!  But, by Bacchus! the way to win a woman is to seize her, after the good old customs of our ancestors!” And with that he drew her close to him—­so close that, though she screamed and struggled like a fury, his lips drew nearer—­nearer——­