A second time she had spoken his name, softly and without embarrassment.  With her nervous fingers tying and untying the two corners of a little handkerchief in her lap, she went on, after a moment of silence in which the ticking of Keok’s clock seemed tense and loud.

“When I was seventeen, Grandfather Standish died.  I wish you could understand all that followed without my telling you:  how I clung to Sharpleigh as a father, how I trusted him, and how cleverly and gently he educated me to the thought that it was right and just, and my greatest duty in life, to carry out the stipulation of my grandfather’s will and marry John Graham.  Otherwise, he told me—­if that union was not brought about before I was twenty-two—­not a dollar of the great fortune would go to the house of Standish; and because he was clever enough to know that money alone would not urge me, he showed me a letter which he said my Uncle Peter had written, and which I was to read on my seventeenth birthday, and in that letter Uncle Peter urged me to live up to the Standish name and join in that union of the two great fortunes which he and Grandfather Standish had always planned.  I didn’t dream the letter was a forgery.  And in the end they won—­and I promised.”

She sat with bowed head, crumpling the bit of cambric between her fingers.  “Do you despise me?” she asked.

“No,” he replied in a tense, unimpassioned voice.  “I love you.”

She tried to look at him calmly and bravely.  In his face again lay the immobility of rock, and in his eyes a sullen, slumbering fire.

“I promised,” she repeated quickly, as if regretting the impulse that had made her ask him the question.  “But it was to be business, a cold, unsentimental business.  I disliked John Graham.  Yet I would marry him.  In the eyes of the law I would be his wife; in the eyes of the world I would remain his wife—­but never more than that.  They agreed, and I in my ignorance believed.

“I didn’t see the trap.  I didn’t see the wicked triumph in John Graham’s heart.  No power could have made me believe then that he wanted to possess only me; that he was horrible enough to want me even without love; that he was a great monster of a spider, and I the fly lured into his web.  And the agony of it was that in all the years since Uncle Peter died I had dreamed strange and beautiful dreams.  I lived in a make-believe world of my own, and I read, read, read; and the thought grew stronger and stronger in me that I had lived another life somewhere, and that I belonged back in the years when the world was clean, and there was love, and vast reaches of land wherein money and power were little guessed of, and where romance and the glory of manhood and womanhood rose above all other things.  Oh, I wanted these things, and yet because others had molded me, and because of my misguided Standish sense of pride and honor, I was shackling myself to John Graham.