He drew a chair near to her sofa, and she let her eyes close sleepily. Through their dark fringes they looked him all over searchingly. Evening clothes, a shirt and collar as immaculate as usual, a neat black tie, two pearl studs, rather flawed and too large. So he had a taste for jewels. His hands, long, deceitful, cruel, lay on his knees. On one of them was a diamond ring, too big for a man, too sparkling. “His cuffs!” she thought, with inspiration. But they were hidden under his black coat-sleeve. One day she had laughed at Cylmer’s plain mother-of-pearl cuff-studs, and he had said that there was nothing a man was so wedded to as a peculiar kind of cuff-stud. “If he wears links, he always wears links, generally of the same pattern. If he wears studs, he never changes the make.” The blood beat hard in her temples. That bluey-green Egyptian beetle could well have been half of a cuff-link, florid, expensive, odd, as were those shirt-studs of pearls and greenish gold. “Why are you so thoughtful, Ismay? Why will you go on hating me?” Wray asked slowly. “Don’t you know it’s no use?” There was a biting answer on her tongue, but she kept it back. She must say something--anything--that would make him hold out his hand to her with a sharp, hasty gesture that would clear his shirt-cuff, links upward, from his sleeve. “And if I did not hate you, what would you do for me?” she moved her hand toward him as if by accident. The next instant he had seized it, was holding it in a grasp that was loathsomely hot and strong. Words she did not listen to poured in a low whisper from his lips. Intent, her face alight with eagerness, she was gazing at his wrist, moving her hand till his lay palm upward under hers. But if she expected to see the scarabs, of which she had one, she was wrong. And yet her heart leaped. For he did wear links, not studs, and they were showy and costly. Ovals of pink coral set round with seed pearls. As she gazed, his low voice in her ears killed the sound as Cristiane parted the curtain. Wray, with his back to the door and off his guard, saw nothing, and Cylmer, cut to the heart, had seen enough. If Cylmer had been one moment later he would have seen her snatch her hand away; wipe it with insolent care on her handkerchief; laugh, with utter scorn in Marcus Wray’s furious face, as, her aim attained, she spoke out: “You might give me the whole earth, and I should hate you,” she cried out with insane bravery. “I hate death, but I would die before I married a man like you!” Dazed, taken aback, he looked at her. “You can go,” she said, smiling like Circe, treacherous and merciless; “I’m done with you.” In the long moment’s pause a door shut somewhere, and she could not know it was Miles, going away. And Wray did not hear it. His hands trembled, his face full of evil, he looked down at her insolent beauty. “But I am not done with you,” he said very low. CHAPTER XXVIII. “MY NAME IS YESTERDAY.”