"Austen! Austen!" Gordon burst out in a frenzy. "For God's sake, don't call him that!" and he brought his clenched fist down on the table with all his strength. The glasses on it rattled at the blow, and the tumbler which Hawke had used, standing close at the edge, fell and splintered on the floor. Gordon laughed at the sight. "That was his glass," he explained. "He was here to-night, drinking with me," and he laughed again, harshly. The girl hurriedly drew her skirts away from the broken fragments. "I am sorry," Gordon said, recovering his composure, "I interrupted you. Go on!" But there was a new hardness in his tone. Kate remarked it, and it grated on her painfully after his forbearance. She paused for a moment, looking at him anxiously. But he made no further sign, and she took up the burden of her tale again. "There I found Mr. Hawke. I don't think I had ever given a thought to him before. But from this time he began to influence me, because of the difference between yourself and him. He paid me no respect, no deference, and outwardly, indeed, no attention; but all the time I felt that he was consciously and deliberately taking possession of me, and I made no struggle to resist him. He became my master--imposed himself upon me until I lost the sense of responsibility for my own actions. It was not that he gave me orders or even suggested them, but somehow I always realised what he wanted me to do, and did it. And I knew besides that he was conscious of my submission and counted on it." Kate had relapsed into the impersonal commonplace manner which had characterised her speech before Gordon broke in. The words fell from her lips in a level regularity, without rise or fall, and she was abstractedly smoothing out one of the broad ribbons of her sash--an old trick of hers, very familiar to her listener. For all the emotion that she showed she might have been dissecting the character of an uninteresting acquaintance. "So that is the way for men to win women!" "Some women, yes!" "Well, there is nothing like buying one's experience, they say." The attempt at sarcasm only served to reveal the intensity of Gordon's suffering. He was sitting with his body bent forward and his chin pressed against his chest; his hands were clenched between his knees, and his whole attitude told of the strain his self-repression caused him. "Go on," he muttered. "I have told you enough," she exclaimed, tossed out of her apathy by a sudden comprehension of the torture her story inflicted. "No! no!" Gordon replied, hoarsely. "Go on! Go on and finish it!"