She had always feared Count Odin, and she feared him now when the true meaning of a man's love had been made known to her and her daily prayer was for Gavin's safety. Not that she doubted herself or the truth of her love, but that she feared that something in her blood which might bring her to the Count's arms and mock for all time her faith in her own womanhood and her spoken word that she would be Gavin's wife upon his return. So greatly did this fear haunt her that the days of waiting became almost insupportable. She would rise with the sun each morning and say, "to-day his letter will come." The nights found her brooding and restless and fighting ever against the insidious advances of a man who made love to her with a Southern tongue--and when he was repulsed had no shame to threaten her. "Your English friend was a fool to go to the mountains," he would say; "we cannot protect him there--my Government is helpless. The prison in which my father lies, sent there by the man who should have been his friend, will not open to an Englishman's knock. If I could have helped your friend, I would have done so because he was your friend. You say that he loves you. I will believe it when the sun shines in England. My dear lady, your heart is in the South with the vine and the pomegranates. All your life has not made an Englishwoman of you. You are like a flower that cries for the sun all day and withers because there is no sun. I will take you to a land of roses and set your feet upon golden sands. We will visit the East together--the color, the life, the music of it, shall enthrall us. There they will teach you how to love. In England your hearts are ice--but you have not an English heart." Day by day these vehement protests would be made; day by day he whispered them in her ear, following her at home and abroad, in the galleries of Melbourne Hall, and to the glades and the thickets of the park. And her father abetted him, not openly by word but silently by impotent consent he acquiesced in her persecution, protesting that Georges Odin's son had a claim of hospitality upon him, and that he could not shut the gates of the house in his face. In plain truth, Robert Forrester sinned not of his will but of despair. He did not dare to tell Evelyn that, by the English law, Dora d'Istran might not be recognized as his wife at all and that she, his daughter, had therefore but a dubious claim to that dignity which the accidents of fortune had thrust upon him. He loved her, understood every whim of that strange, romantic mind, and believed, it may be, that the young Count would not be an unworthy husband for her. But the fear that she would charge him with the shame prevailed above other thoughts. He would not that she should pay the price for the follies and the amours of his youth.