He smiled. "I wonder! Anyhow, let me try! It makes no difference to you that I love you?"

"No," she told him flatly. "None whatever. In fact, I don't believe it."

"I will prove it to you one day," he said. "But let that pa.s.s now, since it has no weight with you. I quite realize that I shall not persuade you to marry me for your own sake or for mine. But--I think you may be induced to consider the matter for the sake of--your friend."

"In what way?" Breathlessly she asked the Question. for again it was as if a warning voice spoke within her, bidding her to go warily.

He paused a moment. Then: "Has it never struck you that there is something rather--peculiar--about her?" he asked suavely.

She brought her eyes back to his in sharp apprehension. "Peculiar? No, never! What do you mean?"

"Are you quite sure of that?" he insisted.

She began to falter in spite of herself. "Never, until--until quite lately. Never till you gave her those--abominable--cigarettes."

"Believe me, there is no harm whatever in those cigarettes," he said. "I smoke them myself constantly. Try them for yourself if you don't believe me. They contain a minute quant.i.ty of opium, it is true, but only sufficient to soothe the nerves. No, those cigarettes are not responsible. That peculiarity which you have recently begun to notice is due to quite another cause. Surely you must have always known that she was different from other girls. Have you never thought her excitable, even unaccountable in some of her actions? Has she never told you of strange fancies, strange dreams? And her restlessness, her odd whims, her insatiable craving for morbid horrors, have you never taken note of these?"

He spoke with deliberate emphasis, narrowly watching the effect of his words.

Olga's hands were gripped fast together; her wide eyes searched his face.

"Oh, tell me what you mean!" she entreated, a piteous quiver in her voice. "Tell me plainly what you mean!"

"I will," he said. "Violet Campion's mother was a homicidal maniac. She killed her husband--this girl's father--in a fit of madness one night three months after their marriage. It happened in India, and was put down to native treachery in order to hush it up, but it was well known that no native was responsible for it. During the six months that followed, she was kept under restraint, hopelessly insane. It was in her blood--the worst form of insanity known. At the birth of the child she died. That will explain to you my exact meaning, and if you need corroboration you can go to Max Wyndham for it. She has begun to develop symptoms of her mother's complaint. All her peculiarities arise from incipient madness!"

"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 _protege_ 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 a.s.signed 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."

She shrank as though he had struck her. "Oh, you couldn't!" she cried out wildly. "You couldn't! No man could be such a fiend!"

He came a step nearer to her, and suddenly his eyes glowed with a fire that scorched her to the soul. "You had better not tempt me!" he said.

"Or I may do that--and more also!"

She put her hands up to shield her face from his look, but he caught them suddenly and savagely into his own, overbearing her resistance with indomitable mastery.

"Promise me!" he said. "Promise me!"

His lips were horribly near her own. She strained away from him tensely, with all her strength. "I will not!" she panted. "I will not!"

"You shall!" he declared furiously. "Do you think I will be beaten by a child like you? I tell you, you shall!"

But still desperately she struggled against him, repeating voicelessly, "I will not! I will not!"

He gripped her fast, holding her face up mercilessly to his own. "You think I won't do it?" he said.

"I know you won't!" she gasped back. "You couldn't! No man--no man could!"

"I swear to you that I will!" he said.

"No!" she breathed. "No! No! No!"

She saw the fury on his face suddenly harden and turn cold. Abruptly he set her free.

"Very well," he said. "Marry you I will. But first I will show you that I am a man of my word."

He swung round upon his heel to leave her. But in that instant the warning voice cried out again in Olga's soul, compelling her to swift action. She sprang after him, caught his arm, clinging to it with all her failing strength.

"You will not!" she gasped out in an agony of entreaty. "You could not!

You shall not!"

He stopped, looking down without pity into her face of supplication.

"Then give me that promise!" he said.

She shook her head. "No, not that--not that!"

"Why not?" he insisted. "Are you hoping to catch your red-haired doctor?

You are not likely to secure anyone else, and he will probably prove elusive."

She flinched at the gibing words, but still she held him back. "No, no!

I don't want to marry anyone. I have always said so."

"Have you said so to him?" asked Hunt-Goring.

She was silent, but the quick blood ran to her temples betraying her.

"I thought not," he said. "So that is the explanation, is it? That is why you will have none of me, eh?"

"Oh, how can you be so hateful?" she cried vehemently.