ago, when the poor silly fool that had been Diana Mayo had ridden blindly into the trap from which her boasted independence had not been able to save her. She had paid heavily for the determination to ignore the restrictions of her sex laid upon her and the payment was not yet over. Her tired body shrank from the struggle that must recommence so soon. If he would only spare her until this numbing weariness that made her so powerless should lessen. She heard his voice at the door and her icy fingers grasped at the book that had slipped to the ground. The thick rugs deadened the sound of his movements, but she knew instinctively that he had come in and gone back to the divan where he had been sitting before. She knew that he was looking at her. She could feel his eyes fixed on her and she quivered with the consciousness of his stare. She waited, shivering, for him to speak or move. His methods of torture were diverse, she thought with dreary bitterness. Behind the tent in the men's lines a tom-tom was beating, and the irregular rhythm seemed hammering inside her own head. She could have shrieked with the agony of it. "Come here--Diane." She started, for a moment hardly recognising the Gallic rendering of her name, and then flushed angrily without answering or moving. It was a very little thing to stir her after all that had been done, but the use of her name flamed the anger that had been almost swamped in fear. The proprietory tone in his voice roused all her inherent obstinacy. She was not his to go at his call. What he wanted he must take--she would never give voluntarily. She sat with her hands gripped tightly in her lap, breathing rapidly, her eyes dark with apprehension. "Come here," he repeated sharply. Still she took no notice, but the face that he could not see was growing very white. "I am not accustomed to having my orders disobeyed," he said at last, very slowly. "And I am not accustomed to obeying orders," she retorted fiercely, though her lips were trembling. "You will learn." The sinister accent of his voice almost shattered her remaining courage. She crouched, gasping, on the ground, the same horrible terror that had come to her last night stealing over her irresistibly, paralysing her. Waiting, listening, agonising, the tom-tom growing louder and louder--or was it only the throbbing in her own head? With a choking cry she leaped to her feet suddenly and fled from him, back till the side of the tent stopped her and she stood, with wide-flung arms, gripping the black and silver hangings until he reached her. Stooping he disengaged her clinging fingers from the heavy drapery and drew her hands slowly together up to his breast with a little smile. "Come," he whispered, his passionate eyes devouring her. She fought against the fascination with which they dominated her, resisting him dumbly with tight-locked lips till he held her palpitating in his arms. "Little fool," he said with a deepening smile. "Better me than my men."