"Will you please go out?" said Lady Vera, still with sorrow in her steady eyes. "No, I will not please. I'll see you damned first!" said Croucher, with sudden ferocity--"like you very near seen me! If we're over'eard, you'll be thought no better'n you ought to be; but by Gawd they won't think you as bad as wot you are!" Lady Vera took no advantage of a studious pause. The ruffian was making his points with more than merely ruffianly effect; the whole thing might have been carefully rehearsed. But to the girl in the upper berth it was now no more than she deserved. It was a light enough punishment for the dreadful deed by her committed--no matter how unconscious, in how fine a frenzy or how just a cause--and on him visited with all but the last dread vengeance of the criminal law. He had a right to say what he liked to her after that, even to say it then and there, with all his natural and acquired brutality. Was it not she who had done most of all to brutalize him? "That is, until I tell 'em," added Croucher, with crafty significance. His hearer had to recall the words before the pause; when she had done so, he was again requested to leave the compartment, and there was a harder light in her eyes. [Illustration: "Surely it isn't Croucher?"] "I'll see you in the morning," she promised. "I'm going on to Rome." He laughed scornfully. "You needn't tell _me_ where you're goin'! I know all about you, and 'ave done for some time. I been on yer tracks, my dear! You seen me. It's your own fault we didn't 'ave it out before. This ain't quite the pitch--but it's a better place than the one you got me into!" "I got you--out again," was what Lady Vera had begun to say, but something about him made her stop short of that. "I was doing my best for you," she continued humbly. "I thought you were going to let me give you a fresh start in life." "A fresh start! I want a bit more than that, lidy!" "Well, what do you want?" He rolled his eyeballs over the racks laden with her hand-luggage. "Your jewel-case," said he promptly. "Which is it?" "That one, in this corner, over my feet." Her equal alacrity might have been the mere measure of her eagerness to get rid of him; but Alfred Croucher was far too old in deception to be himself very easily deceived. "Then you can keep it, with my love!" said he. "I'll trouble you for them rings instead--_and_ the rest wot you're 'idin' be'ind 'em!" The girl turned paler in the electric light She was sitting up in her suspicious readiness to point out the jewel-case; the other hand, with most of her rings on it, had flown instinctively to her throat; for she was traveling, as ladies will, with her greatest treasures--her diamond necklace and pendant, and a string of pearls--on her neck for safety. "Suppose I refuse and----" She glanced toward the bell. "Then I'll say what _I_ know." "And what do you know?" Her back was to the wall.