"I did not carry out your plans. No matter what the intentions were, the points in the case are what actually happened. I can swear I refused to comply with your nefarious wishes, even though you promised me your hand and fortune if I succeeded," he answered, mockingly. "Will not money purchase your silence?" she said, with a deep-drawn breath. "I do not plead with you for mercy or compassion," she said, haughtily. Lester Stanwick laughed a mocking laugh. "Do not mistake me, Miss Pluma," he said, making no attempt at love-making; "I prefer to wrest you from Rex Lyon. I have contemplated with intense satisfaction the blow to his pride. It will be a glorious revenge, also giving me a charming bride, and last, but not least, the possession at some future day of Whitestone Hall and the Hurlhurst Plantations. A pleasing picture, is it not, my dear?" CHAPTER XXXII. Pluma Hurlhurst never quailed beneath the cold, mocking glance bent upon her. There was no hope for her; disgrace and ruin stared her in the face; she would defy even Fate itself to the bitter end with a heroism worthy of a better cause. In that hour and that mood she was capable of anything. She leaned against a tall palm-tree, looking at him with a strange expression on her face, as she made answer, slowly: "You may depend upon it, I shall never marry you, Lester Stanwick. If I do not marry Rex I shall go unmarried to the grave. Ah, no!" she cried desperately; "Heaven will have more mercy, more pity than to take him from me." "What mercy or pity did you feel in thrusting poor little Daisy Brooks from his path?" asked Stanwick, sarcastically. "Your love has led you through dangerous paths. I should call it certainly a most perilous love." She recoiled from him with a low cry, those words again still ringing in her ears, "A perilous love." She laughed with a laugh that made even Stanwick's blood run cold--a horrible laugh. "I do not grieve that she is dead," she said. "You ought to understand by this time I shall allow nothing to come between Rex and me." "You forget the fine notions of honor your handsome lover entertains; it may not have occurred to you that he might object at the eleventh hour." "He will not," she cried, fiercely, her bosom rising and falling convulsively under its covering of filmy lace and the diamond brooch which clasped it. "You do not know the indomitable will of a desperate woman," she gasped. "I will see him myself and confess all to him, if you attempt to reveal the contents of those letters. He will marry me and take me abroad at once. If I have Rex's love, what matters it what the whole world knows or says?" She spoke rapidly, vehemently, with flushed face and glowing eyes; and even in her terrible anger Stanwick could not help but notice how gloriously beautiful she was in her tragic emotion.