Page:The traitor; a story of the fall of the invisible empire (IA traitorstoryoffa00dixo).pdf/174



HE next morning Steve Hoyle left town and Stella began at once to put into execution her plan to entrap John Graham in the meshes of her beauty and deliver him to justice. She felt instinctively that if this man with his intense and romantic nature ever yielded to the spell of her love, there could be no limit to which he would not go at her bidding. With equal certainty she realised that the task would be a delicate one—a task which might put to the test every power she possessed. Her whole being rose to the work with a thrill of keen, cruel interest—the interest of the primitive huntress on track of the rarest, wildest and most daring game.

The first difficulty which apparently opened an impassable gulf between them was the suit which John Graham had begun to regain possession of the estate. The language in which his complaint had been drawn was the limit of bitter accusation permitted in a legal document—parts of it, indeed, the Court had ordered stricken from the record as scandalous and irrelevant.