He went out swearing; and, more dead than alive, Henrietta sank into an arm-chair.  As long as she had been in the presence of the enemy, her pride had enabled her to keep up the appearance of absolute faith in Daniel; but, now she was alone, terrible doubts began to beset her.  Was there not something true in the evident exaggerations of the Hon. M. Elgin?  She was not quite sure.  Had not Sarah also boasted of it, that she loved Daniel, and that she had been in his room?  Finally, Henrietta recalled with a shudder, that, when Daniel had told her of his adventure in Circus Street, he had appeared embarrassed towards the end, and had failed fully to explain the reasons of his flight.

And to crown the matter, when she had tried to draw from M. de Brevan additional information on the subject, she had been struck by his embarrassment, and the lame and confused way in which he had defended his friend.

“Ah, now all is really over!” she thought.  “The measure of my sufferings is full indeed!”

Unfortunately it was not yet full.  A new persecution awaited her, infamous, monstrous, by the side of which all the others amounted to nothing.

“Whether you will, or not, you shall be mine,” had Sir Thorn said; and from that moment he was bent upon convincing her that he was not the man to shrink from any thing, even unto violence.

He was no longer the sympathetic defender of former days, nor the timid lover, nor the sighing, rejected lover, who followed Henrietta everywhere.  He was, henceforth, a kind of wild beast, pursuing her, harassing her, persecuting her, with his eyes glaring at her with abominable lust.  He no longer looked at her furtively, as formerly; but he lay in wait for her in the passages, ready, apparently, to throw himself upon her; projecting his lips as if to touch her cheeks, and extending his arms as if to seize her around her waist.  A drunken lackey pursuing a scullion would not have looked and acted more impudently.

Terrified, the poor girl threw herself on her knees before her father, beseeching him to protect her.  But he pushed her back, and reproached her for slandering the most honorable and most inoffensive of men.  Blindness could go no farther.

And Sir Thorn knew probably of her failure; for the next day he looked at her, laughing, as if he felt that he now might venture upon any thing.  And he did venture upon something, that so far would have seemed impossible.  One evening, or rather one night, when the count and the countess were at a ball, he came and knocked at the door of Henrietta’s chamber.

Frightened, she rang the bell; and the servants who came up freed her from the intruder.  But from that moment her terrors had no limit; and, whenever the count went out at night with his wife, she barricaded herself up in her chamber, and spent the whole night, dressed, in a chair.  Could she remain any longer standing upon the brink of an abyss without name?  She thought she could not; and after long and painful hesitation, she said one evening to M. de Brevan,—­