"Oh, no!" Olga whispered, with fingers straining against each other.
"It's not possible! It's not true!"
"It is absolutely true," he said. "And you know it is true. At the same time it is just possible that the disease may be arrested. Wyndham himself will tell you this. We discussed the matter quite recently. It may be arrested even for years if nothing happens to precipitate it. Of course her people will never let her marry, but she is not, I fancy, the sort of young woman to whom wedded bliss is essential. Naturally, all this has been kept from her. There are not many people who know of it. I am one, because I knew her mother both before and after her marriage, being a young subaltern at the time and stationed at the very place where the tragedy occurred. Wyndham is another, being the protégé of Kersley Whitton to whom the girl's mother was engaged and who was the first to discover the fatal tendency. She married Campion mainly out of pique because Whitton threw her over. He was a man of sixty, and his son was grown up at the time. I have often thought that he behaved with remarkable magnanimity when he adopted the child of the woman who had murdered his father."
Olga shivered suddenly and violently. The horror of the tale had turned her cold from head to foot. She no longer questioned the truth of it. She knew beyond all doubting that it was true.
The sun still shone gloriously, and the yacht slipped on through the shining water, throwing up the sparkling foam as she went. But to Olga the whole world had become a place of darkness and of the shadow of death. Whichever way she turned, she was afraid.
"Oh, why have you told me?" she said at last. "Why—why have you told me?"
"Can't you guess?" said Hunt-Goring.
"No!" Yet her breath came sharply with the word. If she did not guess, she feared.
He looked down at her for the first time unsmiling. "I have told you," he said, "that I mean to marry you, and—in keeping with the part of villain which you have assigned to me—I don't much care what I do to get you."
She met his look with all her quivering courage. "But what has this to do with that?" she said.
She saw his face harden, become cruel. "Miss Campion is nothing to me," he said brutally. "Either you give me your most sacred promise to marry me before the end of the year, or—I shall tell her the truth here and now, as I have just told it to you."