He made a slight movement of impatience. "You know. You know very well. They were meant for the people whom you yourself despise--the crowd you broke away from--men and women like the Farringmores who live for nothing but their own beastly pleasures and don't care the toss of a halfpenny for anyone else under the sun." She went back against the table and stood there, supporting herself while she still faced him. "You forget--" she said, her voice very low,--"I think you forget--that they are my people--I belong to them!" "No, you don't!" he flung back almost fiercely. "You belong to me!" A great shiver went through her. She clenched her hands to repress it. "I don't see," she said, "how I can--possibly--stay with you--after this." "What?" He strode forward and caught her by the shoulders. She was aware of a sudden hot blaze of anger in him that made her think of the squire. He held her in a grip that was merciless. "Do you know what you are saying?" he asked. She tried to hold him from her, but he pressed her to him with a dominance that would not brook resistance. "Do you?" he said. "Do you?" His face was terrible. She felt the hard hammer of his heart against her own, and a sense of struggling against overwhelming odds came upon her. She bowed her head against his shoulder. "Oh, Dick!" she said. "It is you--who--don't--know!" His hold did not relax, and for a space he said no word, but stood breathing deeply as a man who faces some deadly peril. He spoke at length, and in his voice was something she had never heard before--something from which she shrank uncontrollably, as the victim shrinks from the branding-iron. "And so you think you can leave me--as lightly as Lady Joanna Farringmore left that man I went to see today?" She lifted her head with a gasp. "No!" she said. "Oh, no! Not--like that!" His eyes pierced her with their appalling brightness. "No, not quite like that," he said, with awful grimness. "There is a difference. An engaged woman can cut the cable and be free without assistance. A married woman needs a lover to help her!" She shrank afresh from the scorching cynicism of his words. "Dick!" she said. "Have I asked for--freedom?" "You had better not ask!" he flashed back. "You have gone too far already. I tell you, Juliet, when you gave yourself to me it was irrevocable. There's no going back now. You have got to put up with me--whatever the cost." "Ah!" she whispered. "Listen!" he said. "This thing is going to make no difference between us--no difference whatever. You cared for me enough to marry me, and I am the same man now that I was then. The man you have conjured up in your own mind as the writer of those books is nothing to me--or to you now. I am the man who wrote them--and you belong to me. And if you leave me--well, I shall follow you--and bring you back."