“No—no!” She thrust out protesting hands wildly. “Don’t come nearer! If you do, I shall scream! I cannot bear it!”

Clifford Bentley leaned toward her, smiling with white teeth showing between red lips, and regarding the shrinking, horrified girl meaningly. “You fear me—yet you have tasted my warm kisses,” he whispered. “Do you think my rival will want you now, silly Margie?”

Margaret’s brain began to whirl. Surmises too dreadful to shape into words prodded her mind sharply. She threw herself desperately from the bed, anywhere, away from that triumphantly smiling face, and began to scream.

Shriek after shriek rang through the startled house.

The figure of Clifford Bentley retired around the foot of Margaret’s bed and approached that of Clare. Before the older sister’s staring, incredulous eyes he leaned over the sleeping girl—and the next instant he had disappeared, like a dissipating vapor, from her sight.

-9-

The screams of his older daughter brought the doctor stumbling from his room across the hall. He entered abruptly to find Margaret on the floor in a dead faint, and Clare sitting up in bed rubbing her eyes, apparently half dazed. Inquiry failed to elicit anything further than that Margaret had had a nightmare which had so terrified her that she had sprung from bed to fall unconscious on the floor.

After she had been revived and tucked into bed again, and her father had left the girls alone, Clare made her sister tell the whole unbelievable story, while both glanced fearfully over their shoulders into the dim shadows of the room. As Margaret finished, her voice broken with sobs, her eyes wide with her unspoken fears, the lame girl exclaimed with indignation, “He is cruel, Margie, and a coward, to behave like this.”

“I can’t help being terribly afraid. Who can tell how far his power will carry him?” confessed the half-hysterical Margaret.

Clare was silent. She, too, was afraid. More, she was remembering with poignant emotion the last words the seeress had spoken to her. The lame girl pressed both hands tightly against her laboring heart, that beat so painfully in her bosom. Gladly she would have stilled its beating, could she have known surely that the act would purchase immunity for Margaret and happiness for Ned.

“Margie, the first thing we must do in the morning is to see Mrs. Campbell,” she said at last. “She can help us if anyone can. Don’t try to dissuade me, dear; you must admit that even a forlorn hope is worth snatching at, now.”

Margaret had so far lost her former high spirits and self-confidence that she would have assented willingly to whatever plans Clare might have proposed. Still, she could not help questioning Mrs. Campbell’s ability to find a way out of the terrible and tortuous maze in which she and Ned seemed lost.