"You look very foolish," said the doctor, chewing at the end of his cigar, "and you look no more foolish than you have been. Bridgers let you out, eh? Nice man, Mr. Bridgers; what had he been telling you?"
She turned her head again and favoured him with a stare. Then she looked at the angry red mark on her wrists where the straps chafed.
"How Hun-like!" she said; but this time he smiled.
"You will not make me lose my temper again, Little-wife-to-be," he mocked her; "you may call me Hun or Heinz or Fritz or any of the barbarous and vulgar names which the outside world employ to vilify my countrymen, but nothing you say will distress or annoy me. To-morrow you and I will be man and wife."
"This is not Germany," she said scornfully. "You cannot make a woman marry you against her will, this is——"
"The land of the free," he interrupted suavely. "Yes—I know those lands, on both sides of the Atlantic. But even there curious things happen. And you're going to marry me—you will say 'Yes' to the sleek English clergyman when he asks you whether you will take this man to be your married husband, to love and cherish and all that sort of thing, you'll say 'Yes.'"
"I shall say 'No!'" she said steadily.
"You will say 'Yes,'" he smiled. "I had hoped to be able to give sufficient time to you so that I might persuade you to act sensibly. I could have employed arguments which I think would have convinced you that there are worse things than marriage with me."
"I cannot think of any," she replied coldly.