“In the last months preceding my twenty-second birthday I learned more of the man than I had ever known before; rumors came to me; I investigated a little, and I began to find the hatred, and the reason for it, which has come to me so conclusively here in Alaska.  I almost knew, at the last, that he was a monster, but the world had been told I was to marry him, and Sharpleigh with his fatherly hypocrisy was behind me, and John Graham treated me so courteously and so coolly that I did not suspect the terrible things in his heart and mind—­and I went on with the bargain. I married him.”

She drew a sudden, deep breath, as if she had passed through the ordeal of what she had most dreaded to say, and now, meeting the changeless expression of Alan’s face with a fierce, little cry that leaped from her like a flash of gun-fire, she sprang to her feet and stood with her back crushed against the tundra flowers, her voice trembling as she continued, while he stood up and faced her.

“You needn’t go on,” he interrupted in a voice so low and terribly hard that she felt the menacing thrill of it.  “You needn’t.  I will settle with John Graham, if God gives me the chance.”

“You would have me stop now—­before I have told you of the only shred of triumph to which I may lay claim!” she protested.  “Oh, you may be sure that I realize the sickening folly and wickedness of it all, but I swear before my God that I didn’t realize it then, until it was too late.  To you, Alan, clean as the great mountains and plains that have been a part of you, I know how impossible this must seem—­that I should marry a man I at first feared, then loathed, then came to hate with a deadly hatred; that I should sacrifice myself because I thought it was a duty; that I should be so weak, so ignorant, so like soft clay in the hands of those I trusted.  Yet I tell you that at no time did I think or suspect that I was sacrificing myself; at no time, blind though you may call me, did I see a hint of that sickening danger into which I was voluntarily going.  No, not even an hour before the wedding did I suspect that, for it had all been so coldly planned, like a great deal in finance—­so carefully adjudged by us all as a business affair, that I felt no fear except that sickness of soul which comes of giving up one’s life.  And no hint of it came until the last of the few words were spoken which made us man and wife, and then I saw in John Graham’s eyes something which I had never seen there before.  And Sharpleigh—­”

Her hands caught at her breast.  Her gray eyes were pools of flame.

“I went to my room.  I didn’t lock my door, because never had it been necessary to do that.  I didn’t cry.  No, I didn’t cry.  But something strange was happening to me which tears might have prevented.  It seemed to me there were many walls to my room; I was faint; the windows seemed to appear and disappear, and in that sickness I reached my bed.  Then I saw the door open, and John Graham came in, and closed the door behind him, and locked it.  My room.  He had come into my room! The unexpectedness of it—­the horror—­the insult roused me from my stupor.  I sprang up to face him, and there he stood, within arm’s reach of me, a look in his face which told me at last the truth which I had failed to suspect—­or fear.  His arms were reaching out—­