What the father would have done next I do not know. While the cry of his son yet sounded in his ears, another cry—almost an echo from another world—rang ghastly through the storm like the cry of a banshee. It seemed to come from far away, but the next instant a spectral face flitted swift as a bird up to the window and laid itself close to the glass of the French window. A moment more and it burst open with a great clang and clash and tinkle of shattering glass, and a small figure leaped into the room with a second cry that sounded like a curse in the ears of the father.

She threw herself on the prostrate youth, and covered his body with hers, then turned her head and looked up at the father with indignant defiance in her flashing eye. Cowed with terror and smarting with keenest pain, the youth took his wife in his arms and sobbed like the beaten thing he was.

Amy’s eye gleamed—protection grew fierce and fanned the burning sense of wrong. The father stood over them like a fury rather than a fate—stood as the shock of Amy’s cry and her stormy entrance, like that of an avenging angel, had fixed him.

But presently he began to recover his senses, jumping to the conclusion that this worthless girl had drawn Cornelius into her evil ways and was the cause of ruining him and his family forever!

The thought set the geyser of his rage roaring and spouting in the face of heaven. He heaved his whip and a punishing blow fell upon her. But instead of another shriek following the lash, nothing came but a shudder and a silence, and the unquailing eye of the girl fixed itself like a spectre upon her assailant.

He struck her again. Again came the shivering shudder and the silence. Cry she would not, even if he killed her!

The sense that she had kept the blows from falling upon Corney upheld the brave creature. She once drew in her breath sharply, but never took her eyes from the man’s face. Then, suddenly, the light in them began to fade and went quickly out. Her head dropped like a stone upon the breast of her cowardly husband. Now, even mute defiance was gone.

What if he had killed the woman, thought Raymount, as he stood with subsiding passion looking down on the miserable pair.