“Because I hate, hate, hate Marcus Wray!” she whispered hoarsely. “Because he shall never have a penny of Sir Gaspard’s money, nor my little finger, to call his own. I must carry my own sins. I will not be made to help carry Marcus Wray’s! Cristiane----” She went to the glass again, and this time she did not flinch. “Cristiane cannot keep any man from me! I will have it all, all, from marrying Miles Cylmer to beating Marcus Wray at his own game.” For there faced her in the glass her own beauty, strange and glorious. Not a curve of her milky cheeks, a wave of her flax-white hair, a line of her scarlet mouth was lost on her. She gazed steadily into her own eyes in the mirror till it seemed as if a soul not her own gazed back at her from them. They were no longer the eyes of Ismay Trelane, a girl not eighteen years old, but those of a woman who had lived and loved and known the very wisdom of earth long ago, when the world was very young. The old, old smile curved the girl’s lips as she turned away. There was her weapon to fight Marcus Wray--her beauty, her wits, her self-reliance that should never again fail her as it had failed her to-day. “I shall manage them all!” She flung back her lovely head triumphantly, securely. “Who is Cristiane that I should be afraid of her, when he can look at me? She shall help me with him! She shall be the bait that will bring him to me. And I will not go to him with blood on my hands to save Marcus Wray.” Not even to herself would she own that in spite of herself Cristiane had grown dear to her, for to care for any one but oneself and a man was to be a fool, to Ismay Trelane. Her mother--bah! Her mother was safe enough while her enemy was playing for such high stakes. The only danger was lest Wray might think things about Cylmer, and forget his caution in a mad rage of jealousy. That thick, yellow skin, those dark red lips bore the very trade-mark on them of the most ungovernable passion in the world. “It is I who must take care of that,” Ismay mused. “And before I am done, it is Marcus Wray that shall tremble for his skin, not I, nor my mother, nor Cristiane.” She went down-stairs as calm as a lake at dawn; cool and silent she bowed to Marcus Wray where he stood with her mother in the drawing-room, dressed for dinner. She had never seen him in evening clothes, and he was more repulsive in the plain black and white than she had ever dreamed he could be. “What! You don’t shake hands?” he said, with amusement. Cristiane was not coming down, and Mrs. Trelane looked at her daughter as if she longed to slap her. “Don’t be silly, Ismay!” she snapped. “Let her alone,” Wray said quietly. “It will come to the same thing in the end. The harder it is to get a thing, the more I enjoy it.” Even Mrs. Trelane felt cold at his hideous, gloating look at her daughter, but Ismay glanced at him with calm distaste, to which her beauty lent a sting.