"I refer you to yesterday’s papers," it said icily, "for my answer to your ravings about that absurd newspaper story. Your jealousy is insulting, and your aspersions of Mr. Lodge are inexplicable. He is everything that is honourable, and it is only your frenzied attack upon him that is ’unutterably unworthy.’ I sincerely regret that I was so foolish as to marry you when I did. You are unreasonably exacting and I will not be bound by it. You have no right to make demands of me." Hayward had the sensation of being struck in the face. If he had been disturbed with vague doubts theretofore, he was now harassed by very certain and lively fear. The "yesterday’s papers" to which Helen referred him had had a very explicit denial of the engagement, and Helen’s sharp reply admitted her marriage to him; but the last declarations of her letter were ambiguous and defiant, and his heart sank when he remembered that marriages were often annulled, and that, even though the courts might not give freedom, there was no way to compel a wife to live with her husband. Every manner of possibility and expedient whirled round and round in his brain until his thoughts were an almost insane jumble of fear, indecision and wrath. Finally out of the travail of his hopelessness and confusion of ideas there rose his fighting spirit and was born the mighty oath he swore, that she was his, he must have her, and in spite of the world, flesh and the devil, by God, he would have her! One never-to-be-forgotten night was the first he spent after receiving Helen’s letter: a nightmare from his lying down until the dawn. A tumult of shifting phantasms, disordered, chaotic, terrible, assailed him with incessant horrors the night long, while through it all there ran as a continuing and connecting tragedy his struggle to possess himself of Helen. In his wild dreams she was sometimes his and again escaping him; but always when he held her it was by right of might. A time he was clasping her close and warm in his arms, but fainting and unconscious, as he ran with her down Pennsylvania Avenue, Lodge, Rutledge, Phillips and an angry horde in hot pursuit. Again, he was dragging her through a never-ending swamp, limp and lifeless, one side of her face a-drip with blood. With a blood-stained axe he was fighting a furious, breath-spent way through vines and tangled undergrowth, the while there sounded in his ears the lone-drawn baying of hounds upon his track. From that bed of horrors he sprang with relief before the first light in the east. He was glad just to be awake and he felt as if he wished never to close his eyes again. *CHAPTER XXVIII* "You will have Shortman and the landau at the door at ten o’clock," said Mrs. Phillips to Hayward when he appeared for duty that morning. Shortman was the coachman.