"Perhaps you will think better of that decision, and will oblige me by not making yourself conspicuous by holding your breath to listen whenever that person chances to be mentioned. You are not unlikely to hear him alluded to during the coming season, as he has been making a bid for popularity at his new post by taking up the matter of the famine, and," he added with a sneering smile, "relieving it with the money I paid him." The word cut into Bettina's heart. "Paid him?" she said, scrutinizing him with a glance before which even his hard eyes faltered. "Paid him for what?" "Oh, for keeping himself out of my way!" She felt that she had compelled him to this response, and that he would have liked to put it more brutally. As it was, there lurked a sting in it which provoked her to reply. "Did he hold the privilege of your proximity at so large a price?" A smile of quiet irony accompanied the words. As it curved her lips alluringly, Lord Hurdly felt himself touched with the sudden sense of her powerful charm. No one else on earth would have dared to say this to him, or anything remotely comparable with it. There was something very piquant to his jaded palate in the flavor of this audacious speech. Instead of scowling, therefore, he smiled. "I have heard," he said, amiably, "that America was the land of the free and the home of the brave, and certainly you seem to warrant one in accepting that belief." Bettina, a good deal relieved at this turn of affairs, took the opportunity that the moment gave her to say, gravely: "No; I do not consider myself free. I have bound myself, in my marriage to you, and I have no intention or desire to forget the duties which I owe you. But I tell you frankly, Lord Hurdly, that I am not accustomed to either surveillance or tyranny, and I shall not tamely submit to them. In the carrying out of this resolution, at least, you will find that I can be brave." She looked more than ordinarily beautiful as she stood erect before him and said these words, and he had not gazed so fully into her eyes for a long time. He had almost forgotten their magnetic loveliness. At sight of them now his pulses beat quicker. A desire for the mastery of this splendid creature returned to him with a force he would not have believed possible. "Bettina," he said, in a voice which showed an emotion most unusual to him, "have you ever known what it was to love, I wonder?" "Once--once only," she answered, a quaver in her voice and a sudden suffusion of tears in her eyes. "I loved my mother. No one that ever lived could have loved more truly and more ardently than I loved her; but there it began and ended. I never deceived you as to that. I promised you duty and good faith, and I have not failed in these. I never shall so fail. But love, no! I haven't it to give."