"The surviving family, the Talberts, then considered me an unfit guardian. And with the coming of dark times it was difficult to blame them, or disagree..... And so I gave you up---" She had to stop, because the girl had risen beside her in the bed, and this time in deepest earnest, wrapped her arms about the withered neck, weeping as if there were nothing left in all the world. The old woman (old and haggard at fifty) felt a moment of weakness. She wanted to cry herself, to give, and receive comfort in return. But the tears would not come. Then she remembered the man, and was silent. And more than anything else Mary had heard or experienced that night, this simple non-action, and the three words the witch finally uttered. . . brought home to her the full brutality, and continuing tragedy of her mother's life. "He will pay." As the rain beat relentlessly, and the wind howled through the barren pass. Nine Stephen Purceville rose early the next morning. He had slept alone that night, something of a rarity, and woke feeling both cleansed and restless. Cleansed because, like all men who give and take love too freely, he knew in his heart how meaningless the endless procession of women had become. Restless because he fancied, and simultaneously feared it was not true, that he had at last found the woman who would make it all real, and still the inner turmoil which had haunted him time out of mind. He got up and stretched his lean, hard-muscled frame, calling for his valet, who came at once and began helping him dress. This act was by now such a matter of ritual that it left his mind soft and dreamlike, free to think again of that mystical creature of beauty and innocence, so unlike the others, that he would woo, and take as his wife. That he had done nothing to earn, and therefore to deserve such a blessing, that real love could not possibly find him until he stopped using and hurting all who came within his reach---these were thoughts which could never occur to him. Rather, it seemed unlikely that he would ever wake from the dream of dominance and superiority in which he had been raised. For he had been born into wealth, and taught (though not by his father, who in fact had taken little hand in his upbringing) that his noble birth entitled him to both material satisfaction, and the subservient respect of all around him. And because the world could not possibly live up to this contrived and irrational viewpoint, he was forever angry, feeling cheated, though by whom he could not say, of the peace and happiness that were rightfully his.