“Not persecution,” he argued. “That is a hard word to use towards a man whose love overmasters him and makes him unduly importunate.” “A man,” she replied, and from her tone she might have been discussing the point merely from an academical point of view, “a man who cannot control his feelings, but allows them to get the better of him to the annoyance of others, deserves to be kept at a distance, even as you have been.” The last touch perceptibly stung him. There was an unpleasant gleam in his eye as he returned, “But I am determined my state of banishment from you shall last no longer.” Her dark eyes were raised in half-amused scorn. “Indeed? I think that rests with me rather than with you, Mr. Playford.” “It did,” he retorted viciously; “but it does no longer.” He bent over her. “Alexia----” She motioned him away, and rose. “No,” she said, for the first time showing anger; “I will not allow you to call me that.” “I think you will,” he returned. “Let us understand one another.” “If you think there is any misapprehension,” she said, now cold again; “there is none on my part.” “I think there is,” he rejoined significantly. “No,” she maintained scornfully. “I can reckon you up, Mr. Playford. I am sorry you should have thought proper to come here to threaten me.” “Have I?” he broke in protestingly. “Have I threatened you?” “If not,” she answered, “I confess I do not see the drift of what you have said.” “In my own justification, let me tell you,” he urged. “Please.” Alexia resumed her seat with a significant glance at the clock. “I hope it will not take you very long.” How he hated her, this scornful, imperious beauty, who was meeting his attack so skilfully; hated her for her contempt and rejection of him, yet loved her with a fierceness and pervasiveness which he was, with all his self-control, unable to subdue; while he hated and cursed the bands of the passion that encompassed him. “I certainly did not come here to threaten you, Countess,” he began, in a tone schooled almost to apology. “I should hardly have brought myself to repay your graciousness in receiving me by an action so ill as that. I have simply come here, led, driven by an impulse which you forbid me to name, to make a proposition to you, or, if you prefer the word, a bargain with you.” Lying back in her low chair, her eyes fixed almost dreamily upon the little gold pencil-case which she lazily pushed in and out, she just lifted them for an instant to Playford’s face, then lowered them again. But from the light of that instant’s glance he saw no encouragement. “It is easy,” he went on, for the pause had been but momentary, and Alexia showed no desire to interrupt him, “it is easy to moralize and to propound codes of so-called honour, but when a man is possessed by a love as desperate, as all-absorbing as mine, he is scarcely to be blamed if, while human nature remains as it is, he seizes any advantage which fate may give him.”