"I have no choice," the other muttered, hoarsely and sullenly; "you have me in a vice, you know that." "Then it is so understood," Wyverne went on. "You needn't waste your breath in promising and swearing. You'll keep your quarantine, I feel sure. If not,----" (it was a very significant pause). "After all, my forbearance only hangs on your poor father's life, and I fear that is a slender thread indeed." The mention of Gilbert Knowles's name seemed to have no effect whatever upon his son; he did not even appear grateful for its mute intercession between him and public shame: but Alan's voice softened insensibly as he uttered it. When he spoke again, after a minute's silence, his tone was rather sad than scornful. "If you wanted money so much, why, in God's name, did you not come to me? I would have sold my last chance of a reversion, and have begged or borrowed from every friend I had, sooner than have let Clydesdale outbid me. The plunge was taken, when you could once think of such infamy; you might as well have sold yourself to me. Those miserable thousands must have been your only motive, for you had no reason, that I know of, to dislike me." For the first time since the interview began, Harding Knowles looked the speaker straight in the eyes: his face was still white as a corpse's, but its expression was scarcely human in its intense malignity. "You're wrong," he said, between his teeth: "the money wasn't the only motive. Not dislike you! Curse you!--I've hated you from the first moment that we met. Do you fancy, I thank you for your forbearance now? I'd poison you if I could, or murder you where you stand, if I dared. I hated your languid ways, and your quiet manner, and your soft speech, and your cool courtesy--hated them all. You never spoke naturally but once--on the hall-steps of Dene. Do you suppose I have forgotten that, or the look in your cousin's eyes? I tell you I hated you both. I felt you despised and laughed at me all the while, and you had no right to do so--then. It is different--different--now." His brain, usually so calculating and crafty, for the moment was utterly distraught; he could not even command his voice, which rose almost into a shriek while he was speaking, and in the last words sank abruptly into a hollow groan. It was a terrible and piteous sight. But you have heard how implacable at certain seasons Alan Wyverne could be: neither the agony of the passion, nor the misery of the humiliation, moved his compassion in the least; he watched the outbreak and the relapse, with a smile of serene satisfaction that had been strange to his face for some time past.