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298 "you think very bad of me if you suppose I'd have took up with any one less than a viscount."

A long silence ensued, in which the tick of the clock sounded loudly and harshly.

"Marianne," he said at last hoarsely.

"It is all your fault and stupidity," said his wife hastily. "You have no judgment, and a brain on fire with religious craze. If you would but behave like an ordinary, sensible man and think reasonably, you would never have fallen into this mistake. You had only to think a moment reasonably, and you'd know that it was not, and could not be a man, and he only the honourable, and like to be no better than a baron, many hundred miles away at a foreign court, and the postage then not twopence ha'penny as 'tis now."

"Marianne," said Saltren again hoarsely, and he took a step nearer to her, and grasped her wrist. "Marianne, answer me." Saltren spoke with a wild flicker in his eyes as though jack-o-lanterns were dancing over those deep mysterious pools, "as you will have to answer at the great day of account—is Giles not the son of Lord Lamerton?"

"Of course not, I never said so. Who but a fool would suppose he was, and a week's post and foreign languages between? He never left—Munich I think it was, but it may have been Munchausen, and I never left Orleigh all the three years. Besides—I never said it was. I named no names."

Now a shudder ran through Saltren, a convulsive quake, but it was over instantaneously. Then, with his iron hand he pressed the woman's wrist downwards.

"Kneel," he said, "kneel."

"You are hurting me, Stephen! let go!"

"Kneel," he repeated, "kneel."

He forced her from her feet to her knees, before him; she was too frightened to disobey; and her vain efforts to