“Save me!” Olive said, looking from me to Penny Wise and back again. Her glance fell on Rivers, but returned to me, as her face assumed a look of agony.
I couldn’t quite understand, as she must know that with us all there her danger was past.
“Are you his betrothed?” Case Rivers said, bluntly.
“No!” Olive replied, in an indignant tone; “never!”
“Then——” and Rivers seemed about to remove Rodman’s hand from Olive’s arm by force, but Rodman himself spoke up:
“One moment, please,” he said, quietly, and bending over, he whispered in Olive’s ear.
She turned deathly white, her lips quivered, and she seemed about to fall. Whatever the brief words were, they wrought a marvelous change in the girl’s attitude. She lost her air of defiant wrath, and seemed a helpless, hopeless victim of the man who held her.
“Are you engaged to me?” Rodman said, looking at Olive, with a threatening scowl.
“Yes,” she managed to whisper, but so agonized was her face that it was palpable she spoke under coercion.
I was uncertain what to do; Wise, too, looked nonplussed, but Rivers, though a stranger to Olive, seemed imbued with an irresistible chivalry, and drawing nearer to her, he said: