“Don’t tempt me.  Women always cry when men annoy them.  They rage, but they cry as well.”

“I shall not.”

“It’s true that most women would have begun to cry before this.  That is what stimulates me.  You will swagger to the end.  You put the devil into me.  Half an hour ago I was jogging along the road, languid and bored to extinction.  And now——­” He laughed outright in actual exultation.  “By Jove!” he cried out.  “Things like this don’t happen to a man in these dull days!  There’s no such luck going about.  We’ve gone back five hundred years, and we’ve taken New York with us.”  His laugh shut off in the middle, and he got up to thrust his heavy, congested face close to hers.  “Here you are, as safe as if you were in a feudal castle, and here is your ancient enemy given his chance—­given his chance.  Do you think, by the Lord, he is going to give it up?  No.  To quote your own words, ‘you may place entire confidence in that.’”

Exaggerated as it all was, somehow the melodrama dropped away from it and left bare, simple, hideous fact for her to confront.  The evil in him had risen rampant and made him lose his head.  He might see his senseless folly to-morrow and know he must pay for it, but he would not see it to-day.  The place was not a feudal castle, but what he said was insurmountable truth.  A ruined cottage on the edge of miles of marsh land, a seldom-trodden road, and night upon them!  A wind was rising on the marshes now, and making low, steady moan.  Horrible things had happened to women before, one heard of them with shudders when they were recorded in the newspapers.  Only two days ago she had remembered that sometimes there seemed blunderings in the great Scheme of things.  Was all this real, or was she dreaming that she stood here at bay, her back against the chimney-wall, and this degenerate exulting over her, while Rosy was waiting for her at Stornham—­and at this very hour her father was planning his journey across the Atlantic?

“Why did you not behave yourself?” demanded Nigel Anstruthers, shaking her by the shoulder.  “Why did you not realise that I should get even with you one day, as sure as you were woman and I was man?”

She did not shrink back, though the pupils of her eyes dilated.  Was it the wildest thing in the world which happened to her—­or was it not?  Without warning—­the sudden rush of a thought, immense and strange, swept over her body and soul and possessed her—­so possessed her that it changed her pallor to white flame.  It was actually Anstruthers who shrank back a shade because, for the moment, she looked so near unearthly.

“I am not afraid of you,” she said, in a clear, unshaken voice.  “I am not afraid.  Something is near me which will stand between us—­something which died to-day.”

He almost gasped before the strangeness of it, but caught back his breath and recovered himself.

“Died to-day!  That’s recent enough,” he jeered.  “Let us hear about it.  Who was it?”