“No; she only spoke to him out of civility,” said Harry, raising his voice, but looking anxiously at the other. “Here--what do you mean with your confounded shrugs and squirms? Look me straight in the face, and say out what you mean?” The cripple was trembling and his face paling, but not with fear of his companion. He hesitated for one moment, then said, in a hurried low voice, as if the words were wrenched from him against his will: “Very well; don’t mind what I say. Of course I am warning you only for fun, for my own amusement. First go and tell her what nonsense I’ve been talking, and then--then let her meet Colonel Richardson at the lower gate at eleven to-night, and, take my word for it, you won’t be troubled with your wife any more.” “Liar!” hissed out Harry. “Oh, it is only my fun, of course,” sneered the cripple. Harry stood for a moment leaning heavily on the table. His first instinct was to seize his cousin by the collar and confront him with Annie; but the next moment a terrible fear that this was the truth that he was hearing seized him, and a sudden desperate resolve stopped his hand and restored him to an appearance of calmness. The hideous story seemed to him in his excited state only too likely. This would explain her anxiety to get away, her comparative coldness toward himself, and would justify the suspicions he had, not of her purity, but of her faith. “I hate her, I hate her,” he said to himself, as he dashed away from Stephen, out of the library, and flung himself down upon a seat in the empty billiard-room, with his head in his hands. “I thought I did, and now I know it. The little, deceitful, heartless vixen! I’ll just take a leaf out of her own book, and see if I can’t be loving while I mean all the time to make her suffer. You despise me, do you, my lady? I’m a clod, am I? We’ll see to-night if we can’t turn the tables for once. You thought you could turn me round your little finger, I’ll warrant, and laughed at me, and thought me a boor and a silly fool to be fond of you. But you are mistaken, my fine lady! I hate you, I loathe you, and I’ll prove it to you to-night!”