My apathy vanished, and every nerve in me was alive at the words.

‘You cur!’ I cried.  ’She loathes the sight of you.  She wouldn’t touch you with the end of a barge-pole.’

He flicked the ash from his cigar.  ’I think you are mistaken.  I am very persuasive, and I do not like to use compulsion with a woman.  But, willing or not, she will come with me.  I have worked hard and I am entitled to my pleasure, and I have set my heart on that little lady.’

There was something in his tone, gross, leering, assured, half contemptuous, that made my blood boil.  He had fairly got me on the raw, and the hammer beat violently in my forehead.  I could have wept with sheer rage, and it took all my fortitude to keep my mouth shut.  But I was determined not to add to his triumph.

He looked at his watch.  ‘Time passes,’ he said.  ’I must depart to my charming assignation.  I will give your remembrances to the lady.  Forgive me for making no arrangements for your comfort till I return.  Your constitution is so sound that it will not suffer from a day’s fasting.  To set your mind at rest I may tell you that escape is impossible.  This mechanism has been proved too often, and if you did break loose from it my servants would deal with you.  But I must speak a word of caution.  If you tamper with it or struggle too much it will act in a curious way.  The floor beneath you covers a shaft which runs to the lake below.  Set a certain spring at work and you may find yourself shot down into the water far below the ice, where your body will rot till the spring . . .  That, of course, is an alternative open to you, if you do not care to wait for my return.’

He lit a fresh cigar, waved his hand, and vanished through the doorway.  As it shut behind him, the sound of his footsteps instantly died away.  The walls must have been as thick as a prison’s.

* * * * *

I suppose I was what people in books call ‘stunned’.  The illumination during the past few minutes had been so dazzling that my brain could not master it.  I remember very clearly that I did not think about the ghastly failure of our scheme, or the German plans which had been insolently unfolded to me as to one dead to the world.  I saw a single picture—­an inn in a snowy valley (I saw it as a small place like Peter’s cottage), a solitary girl, that smiling devil who had left me, and then the unknown terror of the Underground Railway.  I think my courage went for a bit, and I cried with feebleness and rage.  The hammer in my forehead had stopped for it only beat when I was angry in action.  Now that I lay trapped, the manhood had slipped out of my joints, and if Ivery had still been in the doorway, I think I would have whined for mercy.  I would have offered him all the knowledge I had in the world if he had promised to leave Mary alone.