He reached out a hand and grasped her wrist.  “No,” he said, deliberately, smiling up at her.  “You’ll stay and do your duty—­unless you’re tired,” he added.  “Are you?”

She stooped to bestow a swift caress upon his forehead.  “My own Billikins!” she murmured.  “You’re the kindest husband that ever was.  Of course, I’m going to stay.”

She could scarcely have effected her escape had she so desired, for already a hand was on the door.  She turned towards it with the roguish smile still upon her lips.

Merryon was looking at her at the moment.  She interested him far more than the visitor, whom he guessed to be one of the subalterns.  And so looking, he saw the smile freeze upon her face to a mask-like immobility.  And very suddenly he remembered a man whom he had once seen killed on a battlefield—­killed instantaneously—­while laughing at some joke.  The frozen mirth, the starting eyes, the awful vacancy where the soul had been—­he saw them all again in the face of his wife.

“Great heavens, Puck!  What is it?” he said, and sprang to his feet.

In the same instant she turned with the movement of one tearing herself free from an evil spell, and flung herself violently upon his breast.  “Oh, Billikins, save me—­save me!” she cried, and broke into hysterical sobbing.

His arms were about her in a second, sheltering her, sustaining her.  His eyes went beyond her to the open door.

A man was standing there—­a bulky, broad-featured, coarse-lipped man with keen black eyes that twinkled maliciously between thick lids, and a black beard that only served to emphasize an immensely heavy under-jaw.  Merryon summed him up swiftly as a Portuguese American with more than a dash of darker blood in his composition.

He entered the room in a fashion that was almost insulting.  It was evident that he was summing up Merryon also.

The latter waited for him, stiff with hostility, his arms still tightly clasping Puck’s slight, cowering form.  He spoke as the stranger advanced, in his voice a deep menace like the growl of an angry beast protecting its own.

“Who are you?  And what do you want?”

The stranger’s lips parted, showing a gleam of strong white teeth.  “My name,” he said, speaking in a peculiarly soft voice that somehow reminded Merryon of the hiss of a reptile, “is Leo Vulcan.  You have heard of me?  Perhaps not.  I am better known in the Western Hemisphere.  You ask me what I want?” He raised a brown, hairy hand and pointed straight at the girl in Merryon’s arms.  “I want—­my wife!”

Puck’s cry of anguish followed the announcement, and after it came silence—­a tense, hard-breathing silence, broken only by her long-drawn, agonized sobbing.

Merryon’s hold had tightened all unconsciously to a grip; and she was clinging to him wildly, convulsively, as she had never clung before.  He could feel the horror that pulsed through her veins; it set his own blood racing at fever-speed.