Once pledged to antagonism, Zyp, it will be no matter for wonder, adopted anything but half-measures. Had it only been her vanity that was hurt she would have made me pay dearly for the blow. As it was, her ingenuity in devising plans for my torture and discomfiture verged upon the very bounds of reason. At first she contented herself with mere verbal pleasantries and disdainful snubbings. As, however, the days went on and my old strength and health obstinately returned to me, despite the irony of the shattered soul within, her animosity grew to be an active agent so persistent in its methods that I verily thought my brain would give way under the load. I cannot, indeed, recall a tithe of the Pucklike devices she resorted to for my moral undoing, and which, after all, I might have endured to the end had it not been for one threading torment that accompanied all her whimsies like a strain of diabolical music. This was an ostentatious show of affection for Jason, which, I truly believe, from being more or less put on in exaggerated style for my edification, became at length such a habit with her as may be considered, in certain dispositions, one form of love. The two now were seldom apart. Once, conscious of my presence, she kissed Jason on the lips, because he had brought her a little flowering root of some plant she desired. I saw his face fire up darkly and he looked across at me with a triumph that made me almost hate him. And the worst of it was that I knew that my punishment was not more than commensurate with the offense; that my sin had been grievous and its retribution not out of proportion. How could full atonement and Zyp have been mine together? Still, capable of acknowledging the fitness of things in my sadder hours of loneliness, my nature, once restored to strength, could not but strive occasionally to throw off the incubus that it felt it could not bear much longer without breaking down for good and all. I had done wrong on the spur of a single wicked impulse, but I was no fiend to have earned such bitter reprisal. By slow degrees rebellion woke in my heart against the persistent cruelty of my two torturers. Had I fled at this juncture, the wild scene that took place might have been averted, and the exile, which became mine nevertheless, have borne, perhaps, less evil fruit than in the result it did. CHAPTER XII. THE DENUNCIATION. One November morning--my suffering had endured all these months--my father and Dr. Crackenthorpe stood before the sitting-room fire, talking, while I sat with a book at the table, vainly trying to concentrate my attention on the printed lines.