“Oh!” she exclaimed in a long wail of weary disgust at the obtrusive inquiry, “you don’t want to worry me about that _now_, do you? I’ll tell you all about it some other time.” And she flung her arms back over her head, and laughed up at him through the ivory frame in lazy witchery. Finding, however, that he remained firm and would not look down at her, she changed her attitude, and, by a quick, lithe movement, twined herself coaxingly about him. George gave scarcely a sign of the fierce conflict that was going on within him, between the despotic, wickedly used power this little creature was trying to establish over him, and his own manful determination to assume without delay his rightful lordship. For this once he had the mastery, keeping lip and limb under firm control, and disentangling himself from her arms to hold her away from him, he looked steadily, but with a most loving reserve of tenderness in his eyes, into her half-petulant, half-reproachful face. “Tell me now, darling, and then we’ll kiss all thoughts of it away.” Whereat she made a spring at him to anticipate the reward. But seeing that, instead of lighting up with the flame she wanted to see in them again, his eyes retained the steady, searching look, which moreover seemed to become more grimly resolute for her evasions, she turned to tearfulness, and without actually crying, moaned out in a most melancholy voice, and with a woman’s natural love of piling on the agony, that he had better kill her, since it was plain he did not love her. “Come, darling, you know better than that,” said he gently. “But I am your husband, and you must tell me what I wish to know.” It may be easily imagined that he was becoming madly anxious and suspicious under all these evasions, which seemed to denote that she had something to hide more serious than he supposed. Finding all her artifices useless, and failing in an angry struggle to escape from his arms, she proceeded to unfasten all her bracelets, to tear out her diamond lizard, and after piling them in a heap in her lap, to toss them all with a sudden, violent jerk on to the floor at her husband’s feet. “There!” said she triumphantly, “will that satisfy you?” “Not at all,” said George very quietly. “I should have had them off long ago if I had wanted to. Who gave them to you?” She noticed the increasing sternness of his tone and answered with a sudden quick change to childish fright. “I had them all the time. Mamma sent them to me weeks ago, by Mr. Angelo,” she added with a rapid inspiration. Without any sign or word which seemed to her significant enough for a warning, George’s self-restraint gave way, and grasping her shoulders so firmly in his hands that she could not move to right or left, he forced her to meet his eyes, now flaming with anger, with her own. “Tell me the truth,” he said in a tone she had never heard him use before.