“Is anything sacred to such a man as you?” She rose by an effort, and stood before him, swaying, slightly conscious of dizziness and of shivers, and marvelling a little that she should be unable better to command herself. But she commanded herself at least sufficiently to give him his answer. “Sir, your persecution of me has rendered you loathly and abhorrent in my sight, and nothing that you may now do can alter that. I tell you this in the hope that some spirit of manliness, some sense of dignity, will cry a halt to you; so that you may disabuse your mind of any notion that you can prevail by continuing to pursue and plague me with your hateful attentions. And now, sir, I beg you to bid your creatures fetch the chair in which I was brought hither and carry me hence again. Detain me further, and I promise you, sir, that you shall be called to give a strict account of this night’s work.”
The whiplash of her contempt, which she was at pains to render manifest in every word she uttered, the loathing that scorched him from her lovely eyes, served but to stir a dull resentment and to arouse the beast in him. The change was instantly apparent in the sneer that flickered over his white face, in the ugly little soft laugh with which he greeted her demand.
“Let you depart so soon? How can you think it, Sylvia? To have been at such infinite pains to cage you, you lovely bird, merely to let you fly away again!”
“Either you let me depart at once, sir,” she told him almost fiercely, her weakness conquered now in her own indignation, “or the Town shall ring with your infamy. You have practised abduction, sir, and you know the penalty. I shall know how to make you pay it. I swear that you shall hang, though you be Duke of twenty Buckinghams. You do not want for enemies, who will be glad enough to help me, and I am not entirely without friends, your grace.”
He shrugged. “Enemies!” he sneered, “Friends!” He waved a disdainful hand toward the unconscious Holles. “There lies one of your friends, if what the rascal said was true. The others will not be more difficult to dispose of.”
“Your grooms will not suffice to save you from the others.”
That stung him. The blood leapt to his face at that covert taunt that it was only the intervention of his men had saved him now.
But he made answer with a deadly smoothness. “So much even will not be needed. Come, child, be sensible. See precisely where you stand.”
“I see it clearly enough,” she answered.