"It isn't what he is," she admitted. "He himself is nothing, as you say. It's what is back of him that--that frightens me! Why don't you smoke?" she interrupted herself to ask. Laurie automatically selected and lit another cigarette. "I know what's going to be back of Bertie pretty soon," he darkly predicted. "Whoever he is, and whatever he is doing, he has a big jolt coming to him, and it's coming fast." He laid down the cigarette and turned to her with his most charming expression, a wonderfully sweet smile, half shy, wholly boyish. Before this look, any one who loved Laurence Devon was helpless. "Come," he said gently, "tell me the whole story. You know it's not curiosity that makes me ask. But how can I help you when I'm working in the dark?" As she hesitated, his brilliant eyes, so softened now, continued to hold hers. "And I want to help you," he added. "I want that privilege more than I want anything else in the world." For a long moment she sat still, as if considering his words, her eyes on her hands, folded in her lap. The strange, deep flush he had noticed once before again stained her face. At last she straightened up with a quick movement, throwing back her shoulders as if to take on again some burden they had almost cast off. "I am sorry to seem so mysterious," she said, "and so unresponsive. I will tell you this much, and it is more than I ought to say. In the situation we are in I am in his power, horribly so. He can crush me at any time he chooses." "Then why doesn't he?" The gentleness of her caller's voice softened the brusqueness of his words. "Because--" She stopped again. For the first time she had become embarrassed and self-conscious. She made her climax in a rush: "Lately he insists that he has fallen in love with me!" Laurie uttered an ejaculation. It was not a pretty one, but it nicely fitted the emergency. "He has hoped that to save myself, and others, I will marry him, the contemptible, crawling snake!" The listener was impressed by her comparison. Certainly there was something ophidian about Shaw. He himself had noticed it. "Then, for the time being, you're really safe?" he suggested. "No. His patience is exhausted. He is beginning to realize that I'd rather die." "The police can stop all this nonsense." But Laurie spoke without his customary authority. "Don't imagine that. The police know nothing about this matter, and they never will." A sudden thought struck her and she rose almost with a spring. He rose, too, staring at her in bewilderment. She caught his shoulders and held them tightly, in a grip wholly free from self-consciousness. "If you warn the police," she said swiftly; "if you draw them into this, you will ruin everything. You will do me a harm that could never be undone. Give me your word that you won't. Please, _please_!" She was almost shaking him now. Under the clasp of her hands on his shoulders Laurie paled a little, but his black eyes held hers steadily.