“You hear!”

In these words Hazen loosed out his soul.

The keen cry of the wind running through the house was his only answer.

“You hear!” he repeated, advancing and laying a determined hand upon her arm.  “You have made a mock of us with your pretended deafness.  What does it mean—­Stop! no more play-acting,” he fiercely admonished her, as her eyes assumed a look of startled inquiry and wandered away in vague curiosity to the papers scattered over the floor—­“we have had enough of that; you cannot deceive us—­you cannot deceive me twice.  You played at deafness—­why?  Because Anitra must have some disability to distinguish her from Georgian?  Because you are not Anitra?  Because you are Georgian after all?”

Georgian!

The word fell like a plummet into the hollow of that great expectancy.  Ransom shivered and even Harper’s hard cheek changed color.  Hazen only stood unmoved, his look, his grasp, the spirit behind that look and grasp, implacable and determined.  Their influence was terrible; slowly she succumbed to it against her will and purpose, the will and purpose of a very strong woman.  Her eyes rose in a painful and lingering struggle to his face.  Then, with a cry her drawn and parched lips could not suppress, she flashed them in agony on Ransom, and this long-suffering man read in them the maddening truth.  They were his wife’s eyes; the woman before him was indeed Georgian.

“Speak!” rang out the voice of Hazen, as Harper, realizing from Ransom’s face what Ransom had just realized from hers, stepped to the door and closed it.  “The time is short; I have much, very much to do.  For my sake, for the sake of this much-abused man, whom you allowed to marry you, speak out, tell the truth at once.  You are Georgian.”

“Yes,” fell in almost an inaudible whisper from her lips.  “I am Georgian.”  Then as he loosed his grasp from her arm and she was left standing there alone, some instinct of isolation, some realization of the mysterious pit she had dug for herself and possibly for others, in this avowal of her identity, wrought her brain into momentary madness, and flinging up her arms she fell on her knees before Hazen as under the stroke of some unseen thunderbolt.

“You made me say it,” she cried.  “On your head be the punishment, not on mine nor on his.”  Then as Hazen drew slowly back, touched in his turn by some emotion to which neither his look nor gesture gave any clew, she rose to her feet, and fixing him with a look of strange defiance, added in milder but no less determined tones:  “A tongue unloosed talks long and loud.  You have made me give up my secret, but I shall not stop at that.  I shall say more; tell all my dreadful history; yours—­mine.  I will not be thought wicked because I undertook so great a deception.  I will not have this good man’s opinion of me shaken; not for a minute; what I did, I did for him and he shall know it whatever penalty it may incur.  He is my husband—­his love to me is priceless, and I will hold it against you—­against the Cause—­against Heaven—­yes, and against Hell.”