Lady Agatha shuddered at the recollection, and took a cup of tea. "It was then," she resumed, "that the real persecution began. I was peculiarly helpless, as I have no near relations who might have come to my defense. Representing himself always as the agent of his father, but far exceeding the Earl in the malevolence of his inventions, Reginald Maltravers sought by every means he could command to drive me from public life in England. "Three times he succeeded in having me flung into Holloway Jail. I need not tell you of the terrors of that institution, nor of the degrading horrors of forcible feeding. They are known to a shocked and sympathetic world. But Reginald Maltravers contrived, in my case, to add to the usual brutalities a peculiar and personal touch. By bribery, as I believe, he succeeded in getting himself into the prison as a turnkey. It was his custom, when I lay weak and helpless in the semistupor of starvation, to glide into my cell and, standing by my couch, to recite to me the list of tempting viands that might appear daily upon the board of a Countess of Claiborne. "He soon learned that his very presence itself was a persecution. After my release from jail the last time, he began to follow me everywhere. Turn where I would, there was Reginald Maltravers. At suffrage meetings he took his station directly before the speaker's stand, stroked his long blond mustache with his long white fingers, and stared at me steadfastly through his monocle, with an evil smile upon his face. Formerly he had, in several instances, prevented me from attending suffrage meetings; once he had me spirited away and imprisoned for a week when it fell to my lot to burn a railroad station for the good of the cause. He strove to ruin me with my leaders in this despicable manner. "But in the end he took to showing himself; he stood and stared. Merely that. He was subtle enough to shift the persecution from the province of the physical to the realm of the psychological. It was like being haunted. Even when I did not see him, I began to THINK that I saw him. He deliberately planted that hallucination in my mind. It is a wonder that I did not go mad. "I finally determined to flee to America. I made all my arrangements with care and--as I thought--with secrecy. I imagined that I had given him the slip. But he was too clever for me. The third day out, as one of the ship's officers was showing me about the vessel, I detected Reginald Maltravers in the hold. It is not usual to allow women so far below decks; but I had insisted on seeing everything. Perspiring, begrimed, and mopping the moisture from his brow with a piece of cotton waste, there he stood in the guise of a--of--a croaker, is it, Mr. Cleggett?" "Stoker, I believe," said Cleggett.