Roger looked at her.  Something of her passionate pain and resentment was becoming clear to him.

“I didn’t know it meant as much to you as that,” he said slowly.

“It’s everything to me now!” she burst out wildly.  “The only thing I have left—­left of my world as I knew it.”

His face whitened, and a curious, strained brilliance came into his eyes.  She had touched him an the raw, roused his mad jealousy of all that had been in her life of which, he had had no share.

“The only thing you have left?” he repeated, with a slow, dangerous inflection in his voice.  “Do you mean that?”

“Yes!”—­smiting her hands together.  “Can’t you see it?  There’s . . . nothing . . . here for me.  Are we companions, you and I?  We’re absolute strangers!  We don’t think, or feel, or move in the same world.”

“No?”

Just the brief monosyllable, spoken as coolly as though she had remarked that she didn’t like the colour of his tie.  She looked up, bewildered, and met his gaze.  His eyes frightened her.  They were ablaze, remorseless as the eyes of a bird of prey.  A sudden terror of him overwhelmed her.

“Roger!” she cried.  “We can’t marry!  Let me go—­release me from my promise!  Oh!”—­breaking down all at once—­“I can’t bear it!  I can’t marry you!  Let me go—­oh, please let me go!”

There was a pause—­a pause during which Nan could feel her heart leaping in her body like some terrified captive thing.  Then, Roger made a movement.  Instinctively she knew it was towards her and flung out her arms to ward him off.  But she might as well have opposed him with two straws.  He caught both wrists in one of his big hands and bent her arms downwards, drawing her close to him till she lay unwillingly against his breast, held there in a grasp like iron.

“Will I release you?” he said savagely.  “No, I will not!  Neither now, nor at any future time.  You’re mine!  Do you understand what that means?  It means if you’d one day left to live, it would be my day—­one night, mine!  And I swear to you if any man takes you from me I’ll kill him first and you after. Now do you understand?”

She tried to speak, but her voice failed her.  It was as though he had pronounced sentence on her—­a life sentence!  She could never get away from him—­never, never!  A shudder ran through her whole body.  He felt it, and it stung him to fresh anger.  Her head was pressed into his shoulder as though for shelter.

“Look up!” he demanded imperiously.  “Don’t hide your face.  It’s mine.  And I want to see it!”

Reluctantly, compelled by his voice, she lifted a white, tortured face to his.  Then, meeting his eyes, savagely alight with the fire of conquest, she turned her head quickly aside.  But it was useless.  She was powerless in the vice-like grip of his arms, and the next moment he was kissing her, eyes and mouth and pulsing throat, with terrible, burning kisses that seemed to sear their way through her whole body, branding her indelibly his.