"And here I am, at your mercy!" said Daphne, with sudden sharpness. "You have left me no choice. However, I am quite willing."
The voice was familiar yet strange. There was in it the indefinable hardening and ageing which seemed to Boyson to have affected the whole personality. What had happened to her? As he looked at her in the dim light there rushed upon them both the memory of those three weeks by the seaside years before, when he had fallen in love with her, and she had first trifled with, and then repulsed him.
"I wished to ask you a question, in the name of our old friendship; and because I have also become a friend—as you know—of your husband."
He felt, rather than saw, the start of anger in the woman beside him.
"Captain Boyson! I cannot defend myself, but I would ask you to recognize ordinary courtesies. I have now no husband."
"Of your husband," he repeated, without hesitation, yet gently. "By the law of England at least, which you accepted, and under which you became a British subject, you are still the wife of Roger Barnes, and he has done nothing whatever to forfeit his right to your wifely care. It is indeed of him and of his present state that I beg to be allowed to speak to you."
He heard a little laugh beside him—unsteady and hysterical.
"You beg for what you have already taken. I repeat, I am at your mercy. An American subject, Captain Boyson, knows nothing of the law of England. I have recovered my American citizenship, and the law of my country has freed me from a degrading and disastrous marriage!"
"While Roger remains bound? Incapable, at the age of thirty, of marrying again, unless he renounces his country—permanently debarred from home and children!"
His pulse ran quick. It was a strange adventure, this, to which he had committed himself!