"Don't be foolish, Alida. You know this farmer don't care a rap for you. Own up now, does he?" The answer was a low, half-despairing cry. "There, I knew it was so. What else could you expect? Don't you see I'm your true refuge and not this hard-hearted, money-grasping farmer?" "Stop speaking against him!" she cried. "O God!" she wailed, "can the law give this man any claim on me, now his wife is dead?" "Yes, and one I mean to enforce," he replied doggedly. "I don't believe she's dead, I don't believe anything you say! You deceived me once. "I'm not deceiving you now, Alida," he said with much solemnity. "She IS dead. If you were calmer, I have proofs to convince you in these papers. Here's the newspaper, too, containing the notice of her death," and he handed it to her. She read it with her frightened eyes, and then the paper dropped from her half-paralyzed hands to the floor. She was so unsophisticated, and her brain was in such a whirl of confusion and terror, that she was led to believe at the moment that he had a legal claim upon her which he could enforce. "Oh, that Mr. Holcroft were here!" she cried desperately. "He wouldn't deceive me; he never deceived me." "It is well for him that he isn't here," said Ferguson, assuming a dark look. "What do you mean?" she gasped. "Come, come, Alida!" he said, smiling reassuringly. "You are frightened and nervous, and I don't wish to make you any more so. You know how I would naturally regard the man who I feel has my wife; but let us forget about him. Listen to my plan. All I ask of you is to go with me to some distant place where neither of us are known, and--" "Never!" she interrupted. "Don't say that," he replied coolly. "Do you think I'm a man to be trifled with after what I've been through?" "You can't compel me to go against my will," and there was an accent of terror in her words which made them a question. He saw his vantage more clearly and said quietly, "I don't want to compel you if it can be helped. You know how true I was to you--" "No, no! You deceived me. I won't believe you now." "You may have to. At any rate, you know how fond I was of you, and I tell you plainly, I won't give you up now. This man doesn't love you, nor do you love him--" "I DO love him, I'd die for him! There now, you know the truth. You wouldn't compel a woman to follow you who shrinks from you in horror, even if you had the right. Although the ceremony was brief it WAS a ceremony; and he was not married then, as you were when you deceived me. He has ever been truth itself, and I won't believe you have any rights till he tells me so himself." "So you shrink from me with horror, do you?" asked Ferguson, rising, his face growing black with passion. "Yes, I do. Now leave me and let me never see you again." "And you are going to ask this stupid old farmer about my rights?"