"You speak to me cruelly," the girl said through her tears. "I've been very unhappy!"
"Not as unhappy as you've made Don by your cruelty. Good heavens, these tender girls can be more cruel when they set about punishing us, than the hardest man! And to punish a fellow like that by making him live in an ice-house, when you could have done anything with him by a little kindness! Don't I know that?
"I'm the sponsor for such sins as Don's committed. He was meant to be straight. But I got hold of him through an agent, and caught his imagination when that wild vow was freshly branded on his heart or brain. I have the gift of fascination, Mrs. Donaldson. I know that better than I know most things. You feel it to-night, or you wouldn't sit there letting me tear your heart to pieces—what's left of your heart. And I have an idea there's a good deal more than you think, if you have the sense to patch the bits together.
"I have fascination, and I've cultivated it. Napoleon himself didn't study more ardently than I the art of winning men. I won Don. I appealed to the romance in him. I became his hero and—slowly—I was able to make him my servant. Not much of my money or anything else has ever stuck to his hands. He's too generous—too impulsive; though I taught him it was necessary to control his impulses.
"What he did, he did for love of me, till you came along and lit another sort of fire in his blood. I saw in one minute, when he called on me, what had happened to his soul. It's taken you more than a year to see, though he's lived for you and would have died for you. Great Heaven, young woman, you ought to be on your knees before a miracle of God! Instead, you've mounted a marble pedestal and worshipped your own purity!"
Annesley bowed her head under a wave of shame. This man, of all others, had shown her a vision of herself as she was. It seemed that she could never lift her eyes. But suddenly, into the crying of the wind, a shot broke sharply; then another and another, till the sobbing wail was lost in a crackling fusillade.
The girl leaped to her feet.
"Raiders!" she gasped. "Or else——"
Paul Van Vreck sprang up also, his face paler, his eyes brighter than before.
"They've come after me," he said. "Clever trick—if they've bribed ruffians from over the border to cover their ends. The real errand's here, inside this house."