“Is my touch so burdensome?” she demanded.  “If the pressure of one finger is so unbearable to your sensitive nerves, how will you relish the weight of my whole hand?”

There was a fierceness in her tone, a purpose in her look, that for the first time in his struggle with her revealed the full depth of her dark nature.  Shrinking from her appalled, he put up his hand in protest, at which she changed again in a twinkling, and with a cautious gesture toward the room into which Mr. Sutherland and his friends had disappeared, she whispered significantly: 

“We may not have another chance to confer together.  Understand, then, that it will not be necessary for you to tell me, in so many words, that you are ready to link your fortunes to mine; the taking off of the ring you wear and your slow putting of it on again, in my presence, will be understood by me as a token that you have reconsidered your present attitude and desire my silence and—­myself.”

Frederick could not repress a shudder.

For an instant he was tempted to succumb on the spot and have the long agony over.  Then his horror of the woman rose to such a pitch that he uttered an execration, and, turning away from her face, which was rapidly growing loathsome to him, he ran out of the passageway into the garden, seeing as he ran a persistent vision of himself pulling off the ring and putting it back again, under the spell of a look he rebelled against even while he yielded to its influence.

“I will not wear a ring, I will not subject myself to the possibility of obeying her behest under a sudden stress of fear or fascination,” he exclaimed, pausing by the well-curb and looking over it at his reflection in the water beneath.  “If I drop it here I at least lose the horror of doing what she suggests, under some involuntary impulse.”  But the thought that the mere absence of the ring from his finger would not stand in the way of his going through the motions to which she had just given such significance, deterred him from the sacrifice of a valuable family jewel, and he left the spot with an air of frenzy such as a man displays when he feels himself on the verge of a doom he can neither meet nor avert.

As he re-entered the house, he felt himself enveloped in the atmosphere of a coming crisis.  He could hear voices in the upper hall, and amongst them he caught the accents of her he had learned so lately to fear.  Impelled by something deeper than curiosity and more potent even than dread, he hastened toward the stairs.  When half-way up, he caught sight of Amabel.  She was leaning back against the balustrade that ran across the upper hall, with her hands gripping the rail on either side of her and her face turned toward the five men who had evidently issued from Mr. Sutherland’s study to interview her.

As her back was to Frederick he could not judge of the expression of that face save by the effect it had upon the different men confronting her.  But to see them was enough.  From their looks he could perceive that this young girl was in one of her baffling moods, and that from his father down, not one of the men present knew what to make of her.