And with what unconscious frankness she bared her guilty soul to his scrutiny. How completely she revealed her wickedness to him. At the moment the intruders looked in with burning eyes upon them, Octavia was speaking. Neva stood up near the fire, very pale and slender and fragile of figure, as her father and lover saw with swelling hearts, but her red-brown eyes glowed with the light of an undying courage, her head was poised haughtily upon her slender throat, and her lips were curled in a smile of dauntless defiance. “You see, Craven,” Octavia was saying querulously. “We have starved the girl; we have fed her for weeks on bread and water, until her bodily strength must be nearly gone, and yet she stands there and defies us. What are we to do with her?” “Miss Wynde does not sufficiently realize her own helplessness and our power,” said Craven Black. “Your friends think you traveling with us upon the Continent, Miss Neva. I have posted to-day a letter apparently in your handwriting, under cover to a friend in Brussels, who will post it back to England. That letter is addressed to Lord Towyn. How he will kiss and caress it, and wear it in his bosom, never doubting that you wrote it. I shall send him another letter next week, in your name, breaking your engagement with him.” The young earl made a slight movement but Sir Harold held him still in a grip of iron. Neva’s pure, proud face flushed with scorn for her enemies. “You may send as many letters as you please to Lord Towyn,” she said haughtily, “but you will not deceive him so readily as you did me with that letter purporting to come from papa. Oh, Octavia, I am glad papa never lived to know you as you are, base, treacherous, and full of double-dealing! It is well for him that he did not live, for you would have broken his noble heart. He loved and trusted you, and you have repaid him by oppressing his daughter whom he loved.” The hard, haggard features of Octavia distorted themselves in a sneer. The baronet wondered with a sudden horror if this was the woman he had loved. She looked a very Medusa to him now. “Your father! Your ‘poor papa!’” mocked Octavia, with her hand upon her chest. “You have flung Sir Harold’s name and memory at me ever since we came to this place. And what was Sir Harold? A mere Moneybags to me, that’s all. If you hope to move me to pity you, you couldn’t use a worse name to give effect to your appeal than the name of your father. I never loved Sir Harold Wynde, but I married him because he was rich. You needn’t look so horrified. People marry for such reasons every day, but they have not my frankness to avow it. There stands the man whom I have loved for years,” and she pointed at Craven Black. “It is his son whom I intend you shall marry--” “To enrich you, madam!” cried Neva.