Take them into your keeping, man; and tomorrow morning we will see who has left this suspicious offering in our vestibule .-- You were the first to reach the spot, fair Paula.

Did you see a man about ?" "Yes," she replied with a hostile and challenging stare.
"And which way did he go ?" "He fled across the viridarium like a coward, running across the poor, well-kept grass-plot to save time, and vanished upstairs in the dwelling-rooms." Orion ground his teeth, and a mad hatred surged up in him of this mystery in woman's form in whose power, as it seemed, his ruin lay, and whose eyes mashed with revenge and the desire to undo him.

What was she plotting against him?
Was there a being on earth who would dare to accuse him, the spoilt favorite of great and small...?
And her look had meant more than aversion, it had expressed contempt....

How dare she look so at him?
Who in the wide world had a right to accuse him of anything that could justify such a feeling?
Never, never had he met with enmity like this, least of all from a girl.

He longed to annihilate the high-handed, cold-hearted, ungrateful creature who could humble him so outrageously after he had allowed her to see that his heart was hers, and who could make him quail--a man whose courage had been proved a hundred times.