“Yes, I will,” he said again.  “Your mother—?”

“She hasn’t wakened,” Ella answered.  “I don’t think she has heard anything.  I don’t suppose she will, for she took two of those pills last night that Dr. Rawson gave her for when she couldn’t sleep.”

“It’s just as well she did,” said Deede Dawson.

“Yes, but please undo my hands,” she asked him.  “The cords are cutting my wrists dreadfully.”

As she spoke she glanced at Dunn, standing by the fireplace and listening gravely to what they said, and Deede Dawson exclaimed with an air of great indignation:—­

“The fellow deserves to be well thrashed for treating you like that.  I’ve a good mind to do it, too, before handing him over to the police.”

“But you haven’t released me yet,” she remarked.

“Oh, yes, yes,” he said, starting as if this were quite a new idea.  “I’ll release you at once—­but I must watch this scoundrel.  He must have frightened you dreadfully.”

“Indeed he did not,” she answered quickly, again looking at Dunn.  “No, he didn’t,” she said again with a touch of defiance in her manner and a certain slightly lifting her small, round chin.  “At least not much after just at first,” she added.

“I’ll loose you,” Deede Dawson said once more, and coming up to her, he began to fumble in a feeble, ineffectual way at the cords that secured her wrists.

“Jove, he’s tied you up pretty tight, Ella!” he said.

“He believes in doing his work thoroughly, I suppose,” she remarked, lifting her eyes to Dunn’s with a look in them that was partly questioning and partly puzzled and wholly elusive.  “I daresay he always likes to do everything thoroughly.”

“Seems so,” said Deede Dawson, giving up his fumbling and ineffectual efforts to release her.

He stepped back and stood behind her chair, looking from her to Dunn and back again, and once more Dunn was conscious of an impression that he wished to make use for his own purposes of the girl’s position, but that he did not know how to do so.

“You are a nice scoundrel,” said Deede Dawson suddenly, with an indignation that seemed to Dunn largely assumed.  “Treating a girl like this.  Ella, what would you like done to him?  He deserves shooting.  Shall I put a bullet through him for you?”

“He might have treated me worse, I suppose,” said Ella quietly.  “And if you would be less indignant with him, you might be more help to me.  There are scissors on the table somewhere.”

“I’ll get them,” Deede Dawson said.  “I’ll get them,” he repeated, as though now at last finally making up his mind.

He took the scissors from the toilet-table where they lay before the looking-glass and cut the cords by which Ella was secured.

With a sigh of relief she straightened herself from the confined position in which she had been held and began to rub her wrists, which were slightly inflamed where the cords had bruised her soft skin.