“Leave it to me.  I’ll see to it all,” she proclaimed.  “Good gracious, there’s a post in the country, isn’t there?  Patterns can be sent and everything got under way, and finally Madame Veronique shall come down here for the fittings.  So that’s that!”

But in spite of Kitty’s good offices, Nan was beginning to find the thorns in her path.  Now that her health was more or less restored, Roger no longer exercised the same self-control.  The postponing of the wedding-day to a date six weeks ahead roused him to an impatience he made no effort to conceal.

“But for your uncle’s death and Kitty’s prolonging your convalescence so absurdly, we should have been married by now,” he told her one day with a thwarted note in his voice.

Nan shivered a little.

“Yes,” she said.  “We should have been married.”

“Well”—­his keen, grey eyes swept her face—­“there’ll be no further postponement.  I shall marry you if the whole of your family chooses to die at the same moment.  Even if you yourself were dying you should be my wife—­my wife—­first.”

Roger’s nature seemed to have undergone a curious change—­an intensifying of his natural instincts, as it were.  Those long hours of apprehension during which he had really believed that Nan had left him, followed by her illness, when death so nearly snatched her from him, had strengthened his desire for possession, rousing his love to fever heat and setting loose within him a corresponding jealousy.

Nan could not understand his attitude towards her in the very least.  In the first instance he had yielded with a fairly good grace to Kitty’s advice regarding the date of the wedding, but within a few days he had suddenly become restive and dissatisfied.  Had Nan known it, an apparently careless remark of Isobel Carson’s had sown the seed.

“It’s curious that your marriage with Nan still seems to hang on the horizon, Roger,” she had remarked reflectively.  “It’s always ’jam to-morrow,’ isn’t it?  You’d better take care she doesn’t give you the slip altogether!”—­smilingly.

Very often, since then, he would sit watching Nan with a sullen, brooding look in his eyes, and on occasion he seemed a prey to morose suspicion, when he would question her dictatorially as to what she had been doing since they had last met.  At times he was roughly tender with her, abruptly passionate and demanding, and she grew to dread these moods even more than his outbreaks of temper.

It was now more than ever impossible for her to respond, and only yesterday, when he had suddenly caught her in his arms, kissing her fiercely yet feeling her lips lie stiff and unresponsive beneath his own, he had almost flung her from him.  Then, gripping her by the arm until the delicate flesh showed red and bruised beneath the pressure, he had said savagely: 

“By God, Nan!  I’ll make you love me—­or break you!”