concluded with these words: 'Had Archibald lived you would have
been a countess. You may still be a countess--but you must drop
this suffragist show, you know. It is all bally rot, Agatha, all
bally rot.' I would not have married him without the condition,
for I despised the man himself; but the condition made me furious
and I drove him from my sight with words that turned him white
and made him my enemy forever. 'You will not be my countess,
then,' he said. 'Very well--but I can promise you that you will
cease to be a suffragist.' I can still see the evil flash of his
eye behind his monocle as he uttered these words and turned
away."

Lady Agatha shuddered at the recollection, and took a cup of tea.

"It was then," she resumed, "that the real persecution began. I
was peculiarly helpless, as I have no near relations who might
have come to my defense. Representing himself always as the
agent of his father, but far exceeding the Earl in the
malevolence of his inventions, Reginald Maltravers sought by
every means he could command to drive me from public life in
England.

"Three times he succeeded in having me flung into Holloway Jail.
I need not tell you of the terrors of that institution, nor of
the degrading horrors of forcible feeding. They are known to a
shocked and sympathetic world. But Reginald Maltravers
contrived, in my case, to add to the usual brutalities a peculiar
and personal touch. By bribery, as I believe, he succeeded in
getting himself into the prison as a turnkey. It was his custom,
when I lay weak and helpless in the semistupor of starvation, to