When Mount Dunstan got his captive into the shed the blood which had surged in Red Godwyn’s veins was up and leaping.  Anstruthers, his collar held by a hand with fingers of iron, writhed about and turned a livid, ghastly face upon his captor.

“You have twice my strength and half my age, you beast and devil!” he foamed in a half shriek, and poured forth frightful blasphemies.

“That counts between man and man, but not between vermin and executioner,” gave back Mount Dunstan.

The heavy whip, flung upward, whistled down through the air, cutting through cloth and linen as though it would cut through flesh to bone.

“By God!” shrieked the writhing thing he held, leaping like a man who has been shot.  “Don’t do that again!  Damn you!” as the unswerving lash cut down again—­again.

What followed would not be good to describe.  Betty through the open door heard wild and awful things—­and more than once a sound as if a dog were howling.

When the thing was over, one of the two—­his clothes cut to ribbons, his torn white linen exposed, lay, a writhing, huddled worm, hiccoughing frenzied sobs upon the earth in a corner of the cart-shed.  The other man stood over him, breathless and white, but singularly exalted.

“You won’t want your horse to-night, because you can’t use him,” he said.  “I shall put Miss Vanderpoel’s saddle upon him and ride with her back to Stornham.  You think you are cut to pieces, but you are not, and you’ll get over it.  I’ll ask you to mark, however, that if you open your foul mouth to insinuate lies concerning either Lady Anstruthers or her sister I will do this thing again in public some day—­on the steps of your club—­and do it more thoroughly.”

He walked into the cottage soon afterwards looking, to Betty Vanderpoel’s eyes, pale and exceptionally big, and also more a man than it is often given even to the most virile male creature to look—­and he walked to the side of her resting place and stood there looking down.

“I thought I heard a dog howl,” she said.

“You did hear a dog howl,” he answered.  He said no other word, and she asked no further question.  She knew what he had done, and he was well aware that she knew it.

There was a long, strangely tense silence.  The light of the moon was growing.  She made at first no effort to rise, but lay still and looked up at him from under splendid lifted lashes, while his own gaze fell into the depth of hers like a plummet into a deep pool.  This continued for almost a full minute, when he turned quickly away and walked to the hearth, indrawing a heavy breath.

He could not endure that which beset him; it was unbearable, because her eyes had maddeningly seemed to ask him some wistful question.  Why did she let her loveliness so call to him.  She was not a trifler who could play with meanings.  Perhaps she did not know what her power was.  Sometimes he could believe that beautiful women did not.