“Do you mean it, Maurice?” she gasped. “My darling, do you really and truly mean it?”
“Mean it? Of course I do. It was with no other object I went risking my life a dozen times a day in that ghastly desert. With the wealth that is ours we can afford to defy all the world—that she-devil included. And we will.”
“Yes, we will.”
Their lips met once more, and thus the compact was sealed. Alas—poor Violet! She had given herself over, bound, into the enemy’s hand. She had sold herself, and the price paid was the price of blood—even the blood of him who had sacrificed his own life for her sake.
Chapter Thirty Six.
Sellon’s Last Lie.
But that he held the key to it in the shape of Violet’s communication, the reserve, not to say coldness, of his reception by the family, would have astonished Sellon not a little. Now, however, it in no wise disconcerted him; rather, it struck him in the light of a joke. He had got his cue, and meant to act up to it.
So when his somewhat involuntary host asked if he would mind giving him a private interview, he replied with the jolliest laugh in the world—