“You can’t take me back!” It was Puck’s voice, but not as Merryon had ever heard it before.  She flashed round like a hunted creature at bay, her eyes blazing a wild defiance into the mocking eyes opposite.  “You can’t take me back!” she repeated, with quivering insistence.  “Our marriage was—­no marriage!  It was a sham—­a sham!  But even if—­even if—­it had been—­a true marriage—­you would have to—­set me—­free—­now.”

“And why?” said Vulcan, with his evil smile.

She was white to the lips, but she faced him unflinching.  “There is—­a reason,” she said.

“In—­deed!” He uttered a scoffing laugh of deadly insult.  “The same reason, I presume, as that for which you married me?”

She flinched at that—­flinched as if he had struck her across the face.  “Oh, you brute!” she said, and shuddered back against Merryon’s supporting arm.  “You wicked brute!”

It was then that Merryon wrenched himself free from that paralysing constriction that bound him, and abruptly intervened.

“Puck,” he said, “go!  Leave us!  I will deal with this matter in my own way.”

She made no move to obey.  Her face was hidden in her hands.  But she was sobbing no longer, only sickly shuddering from head to foot.

He took her by the shoulder.  “Go, child, go!” he urged.

But she shook her head.  “It’s no good,” she said.  “He has got—­the whip-hand.”

The utter despair of her tone pierced straight to his soul.  She stood as one bent beneath a crushing burden, and he knew that her face was burning behind the sheltering hands.

He still held her with a certain stubbornness of possession, though she made no further attempt to cling to him.

“What do you mean by that?” he said, bending to her.  “Tell me what you mean!  Don’t be afraid to tell me!”

She shook her head again.  “I am bound,” she said, dully, “bound hand and foot.”

“You mean that you really are—­married to him?” Merryon spoke the words as it were through closed lips.  He had a feeling as of being caught in some crushing machinery, of being slowly and inevitably ground to shapeless atoms.

Puck lifted her head at length and spoke, not looking at him.  “I went through a form of marriage with him,” she said, “for the sake of—­of—­of—­decency.  I always loathed him.  I always shall.  He only wants me now because I am—­I have been—­valuable to him.  When he first took me he seemed kind.  I was nearly starved, quite desperate, and alone.  He offered to teach me to be an acrobat, to make a living.  I’d better have drowned myself.”  A little tremor of passion went through her voice; she paused to steady it, then went on.  “He taught by fear—­and cruelty.  He opened my eyes to evil.  He used to beat me, too—­tie me up in the gymnasium—­and beat me with a whip till—­till I was nearly beside myself and ready to promise anything—­anything, only to stop the torture.  And so he got everything