He kept her in perpetual slavery also for him in the world; he made her serve his interests with all her relatives and friends; he sometimes exacted what was not only difficult but almost impossible, and she had to get it done somehow or other. His ambitions grew with what they fed on, and he became arrogant, critical, overbearing in his expectations. “I mean to die a lord and a cabinet minister,” he said, with a sense that death could only be his obedient valet like the Conservative party. “If wishes could kill you, you would fall dead where you stand,” she thought; but she dared not say so, and she devoured her hatred and her humiliation in silence. “You aren’t so young as you were, my beauty,” he said one day out of doors, staring ruthlessly at her. “Billy don’t agree with you, eh? Keep worrying the curb, don’t you? Pull as hard as you will, you won’t get your head. You’re between my shafts, and you must just go quiet over the stones at my pace, my lady fair.” The stones were very sharp, and this road was apparently without an end. She grew thin, she looked harassed and hectic, she contracted a nervous way of glancing back over her shoulder to see if he were within earshot, even when she knew that he was a hundred miles away. One day when he was with her one of her many admirers sent her a large gilded gondola-shaped basket filled with Palestine lilies and La France roses. “Who sent these?” he growled, and he pulled the card off it and read the name. It was a great name. “What’s this mean, eh?” he said as he showed her the card. “It means nothing at all,” she said, with that tremor in her which was partly impotent rage and chiefly genuine fear; and added, with a little nervous laugh, “We have no language of flowers like the Orientals.” “Eh?” said Massarene, who did not understand--“mean nothing, do they? That’s one of your damned lies. Now ye hearken to me, my lady. Him as sent ’em’s so deep in my debt that he’d hev to turn crossin’ sweeper if I held up my little finger. Now I won’t hev my debtors come gallivantin’ to my sweetheart. Mind that. Make him keep his distance or it’ll be worse for him and for you. You know Billy by this time.” Then he kicked over the gilded gondola and trampled the beautiful flowers under his big feet. Her nerves gave way under the sickening nausea of the scene. She buried her face in her hands and sobbed aloud, her tortured pride of race and of womanhood writhing like some delicate animal in a steel trap. William Massarene stood and watched her, his thumbs in the armholes of his coat, his legs wide apart, his yellow teeth showing in a broad grin. It was rare sport. It had cost him an almighty pile of dollars, but it was rare sport. He felt that after his long career of hard work and self-denial he had earned the right to some such fun and feast as this. CHAPTER XXIX.