There was the sound of rushing water in her ears, and for a moment she was blind. How dared he! To her, a Dudley! Then she knew she was looking full at him with unutterable scorn in her eyes. He saw the contempt and indignity which his words had aroused, and his face blackened.
"Just as you will!" he said, roughly. "It's nothing to me. There was a time when I would have made you mistress of this house, and had it not been for a scoundrelly, meddling doctor you might have married me! You love him now—I know! I'm not a fool, but precious little happiness you'll get from him. They ran him out of Jericho for mixing up with a married woman, and if you want to marry a rascal like that you're welcome to do it!"
He stopped, and glared at her like a baffled animal.
She could not yet find her voice. In a vague way she knew that she had been hurt, sorely wounded; that a profane foot had trodden in the holy of holies in her breast, and that a profane hand had snatched at the sacred fire which burned upon the altar there. She knew that never in her life before had she felt as she did now. Her purity had been affronted, and a friend's dear name had been attacked. She was crushed, dumb, and realizing that she had failed miserably in her mission, she dully turned The Prince's head towards the gate, and started to ride away. But on the instant Marston's hand was on the bridle near the bit, and Marston's figure loomed in her path.
"Not yet!" he gritted, venom flashing from his little eyes. "There is more to tell, and I don't think I'll have a lovely opportunity like this again soon! You refuse? You refuse my price?"
Still the girl did not answer. She could not answer, for her tongue seemed paralyzed. A rabid sort of anger was mounting again in the fiend before her. She saw its signals flare in a renewed gleam in his sodden eyes, in the dull red, gorged muscles of his thick throat. His coarse lips were twitching, as though forming words too awful for her to hear. At this moment, too, a cloud passed before the sun, and a quick lessening of light was perceptible. To Julia it almost amounted to gloom, seated as she was in the dank shade of one of the funereal cedars, and she could have cried out in pure physical terror had her voice at that moment been subservient to her will. For there before her, almost within arm's length, stood Devil Marston, like a huge spider in his loathesomeness, compelling her to remain where she was, and listen to whatever tale of malice, flavoured with a grain of truth, perhaps, which he might care to relate.
"The terms! The terms!" he said, again, thrusting his face towards her with all its projecting teeth visible. "You won't be hurt! What's a glass of wine and a kiss? Tut! The first is nothing, and I'll bet that jackanapes of a doctor gets plenty of the second! Isn't one for me worth two hundred and fifty dollars?"
This speech broke Julia's reserve, with its cruel, brutal accusation.
"Hush!" she exclaimed, all the dormant and deadened forces of her nature awaking to full and vigorous protest. "Don't dare to say such things to me, Devil Marston! I came alone to your house this morning, because, though I knew that you were a bad man, I believed that I would be received and treated with proper respect. You have forfeited all right to any kind of consideration; you have trampled upon my finer feelings and made me suffer keenly—and you shall pay! You shall pay!"
She leaned from her saddle-bow towards him, setting her flame-tinged face with its large, distressed, undaunted eyes in opposition to his vulgar visage lit with fires from hell.