never been uttered.

"I know how to protect my wife," he reiterated. "I will shoot any man
who tries to take you from me."

He reached her with the words, and for the first time she flinched, so
terrible was his look. She shrank away from him till she stood against
the closed door. Through lips that felt stiff and cold she forced her
protest.

"Indeed--indeed--you don't know what you are doing. Open the door
and--let me--go!"

Her voice sounded futile even to herself. Before she ceased to speak,
his arms were holding her, his lips, fiercely passionate, were seeking
hers.

She struggled to avoid them, but her strength was as a child's. He
quelled her resistance with merciless force. He choked the cry she tried
to utter with the fiery insistence of his kisses. He held her crushed
against his heart, so overwhelming her with the volcanic fires of his
passion that in the end she lay in his hold helpless and gasping, too
shattered to oppose him further.

She scarcely knew when the fearful tempest began to abate. All sense of
time and almost of place had left her. She was dizzy, quivering, on
fire, wholly incapable of coherent thought, when at last it came to her
that the storm was arrested.

She heard a voice above her, a strangely broken voice. "My God!" it