“I will never believe you--never! You may kill me, too, if you like,” she added, with a slow malice that made him hasten to clinch his lie. “It’s true. The black woman told you what she saw. If I don’t tell you all I saw, it’s because I want to spare you.” But she was not listening. The tireless jar of the engines had stopped; the yacht was lying quiet on a quiet sea. “We’re at home in England,” said Erle coolly. “What will you do?” “Accuse you--give you up,” she thought, and said nothing. To be silent was the only chance of doing it. She wished now that she had held her tongue, as she felt in her sash her only proof that he might have had a motive, since Andria was his discarded wife. She must play her game better than this. If he feared her he would never let her go. “Oh,” she said, with a pitiful shrinking from the awful task of avenging the dead, “tell me, swear to me that all you’ve said is true. Then I’ll go away with Amelia and Chloe and never trouble you any more.” “Look!” said Erle, and pointed out the port-hole. There in a boat with their bundles were Chloe and Amelia Jane. “You can’t; they won’t take you. All they want is to get safe on shore. Let them go, ungrateful beasts! Do you know they dared to say you had the evil eye?” Amelia Jane’s queer manner and terror of her returned to Beryl’s memory, all of a piece with her hurry to be gone. He was telling the truth now, and her face grew white and vacant. The black woman had deserted her. She was too stunned to imagine the truth, that they were being hurried off to join an outbound vessel for Jamaica; they knew too much to be let stay in England. Erle was quick to see his advantage. “Let them go,” he repeated, “I do not want any servants who say of you what you say of me--that it was through you death came.” “Through me!” “They said--oh, it’s ghastly nonsense! But they said it was you who could make those jaguars come and go as you pleased; that it was you who set them on. You see, I am not the only person who is thought--guilty!” He did not say how, when Amelia Jane had owned to seeing Beryl play with jaguar cubs, it had been easy to put the rest of the wicked thought in her head, nor who had put it there. But the girl in dumb agony saw where she stood. She was utterly in his power. He might ask her where she meant to go, but it was all pretense. She would never get away from him and his father. With a strange quiet she turned from him, but it was the silence of danger, not of despair. “You see,” he said, with the soft voice women had loved, “other people might be as hard to you as you have been to me, mad as it sounds. Can I never make you understand we are your only real friends? If we turn against you----” “Yes,” she said, “I hear you. Please go, Mr. Erle. I--I can’t talk any more.”