Dr. van Heerden sat by the side of the big four-poster bed, where the girl lay, and his cold blue eyes held a spark of amusement.

"You look very foolish," he said.

Oliva Cresswell turned her head sharply so as to remove the man from her line of vision.

More than this she could not do, for her hands and feet were strapped, and on the pillow, near her head, was a big bath-towel saturated with water which had been employed in stifling her healthy screams which marked her return to understanding.

"You look very foolish," said the doctor, chewing at the end of his cigar, "and you look no more foolish than you have been. Bridgers let you out, eh? Nice man, Mr. Bridgers; what had he been telling you?"

She turned her head again and favoured him with a stare. Then she looked at the angry red mark on her wrists where the straps chafed.

"How Hun-like!" she said; but this time he smiled.

"You will not make me lose my temper again, Little-wife-to-be," he mocked her; "you may call me Hun or Heinz or Fritz or any of the barbarous and vulgar names which the outside world employ to vilify my countrymen, but nothing you say will distress or annoy me. To-morrow you and I will be man and wife."

"This is not Germany," she said scornfully. "You cannot make a woman marry you against her will, this is----"

"The land of the free," he interrupted suavely. "Yes--I know those lands, on both sides of the Atlantic. But even there curious things happen. And you're going to marry me--you will say 'Yes' to the sleek English clergyman when he asks you whether you will take this man to be your married husband, to love and cherish and all that sort of thing, you'll say 'Yes.'"

"I shall say 'No!'" she said steadily.

"You will say 'Yes,'" he smiled. "I had hoped to be able to give sufficient time to you so that I might persuade you to act sensibly. I could have employed arguments which I think would have convinced you that there are worse things than marriage with me."

"I cannot think of any," she replied coldly.

"Then you are singularly dense," said the doctor. "I have already told you the conditions under which that marriage will take place. There might be no marriage, you know, and a different end to this adventure," he said, significantly, and she shivered.

He said nothing more for five minutes, simply sitting biting at the cigar between his teeth and looking at her blankly, as though his thoughts were far away and she was the least of the problems which confronted him.

"I know it is absurd to ask you," he said suddenly, "but I presume you have not devoted any of your studies to the question of capital punishment. I see you haven't; but there is one interesting fact about the execution of criminals which is not generally known to the public, and it is that in many countries, my own for example, before a man is led to execution he is doped with a drug which I will call 'Bromocine.' Does that interest you?"

She made no reply, and he laughed quietly.

"It should interest you very much," he said. "The effect of Bromocine," he went on, speaking with the quiet precision of one who was lecturing on the subject to an interested audience, "is peculiar. It reduces the subject to a condition of extreme lassitude, so that really nothing matters or seems to matter. Whilst perfectly conscious the subject goes obediently to his death, behaves normally and does just what he is told--in fact, it destroys the will."

"Why do you tell me this?" she asked, a sudden fear gripping her heart.

He half-turned in his chair, reached out his hand and took a little black case from the table near the window. This he laid on the bed and opened, and she watched him, fascinated. He took a tiny bottle containing a colourless liquid, and with great care laid it on the coverlet. Then he extracted a small hypodermic syringe and a needle-pointed nozzle. He uncorked the bottle, inserted the syringe and filled it, then he screwed on the needle, pressed the plunger until a fine jet leapt in the air, then he laid it carefully back in the case.

"You say you will not marry me and I presume that you would make a scene when I bring in the good English parson to perform the ceremony. I had hoped," he said apologetically, "to have given you a wedding with all the pomp and circumstance which women, as I understand, love. Failing that, I hoped for a quiet wedding in the little church out yonder." He jerked his head toward the window. "But now I am afraid that I must ask his reverence to carry out the ceremony in this house."

He rose, leant over her and deftly pulled back her sleeve.

"If you scream I shall smother you with the towel," he said. "This won't hurt you very much. As I was going to say, you will be married here because you are in a delicate state of health and you will say 'Yes.'"

She winced as the needle punctured the skin.

"It won't hurt you for very long," he said calmly. "You will say 'Yes,' I repeat, because I shall tell you to say 'Yes.'"

Suddenly the sharp pricking pain in her arm ceased. She was conscious of a sensation as though her arm was being blown up like a bicycle tyre, but it was not unpleasant. He withdrew the needle and kept his finger pressed upon the little red wound where it had gone in.

"I shall do this to you again to-night," he said, "and you will not feel it at all, and to-morrow morning, and you will not care very much what happens. I hope it will not be necessary to give you a dose to-morrow afternoon."

"I shall not always be under the influence of this drug," she said between her teeth, "and there will be a time of reckoning for you, Dr. van Heerden."

"By which time," he said calmly, "I shall have committed a crime so wonderful and so enormous that the mere offence of 'administering a noxious drug'--that is the terminology which describes the offence--will be of no importance and hardly worth the consideration of the Crown officers. Now I think I can unfasten you." He loosened and removed the straps at her wrists and about her feet and put them in his pocket.

"You had better get up and walk about," he said, "or you will be stiff. I am really being very kind to you if you only knew it. I am too big to be vindictive. And, by the way, I had an interesting talk with your friend, Mr. Beale, this afternoon, a persistent young man who has been having me shadowed all day." He laughed quietly. "If I hadn't to go back to the surgery for the Bromocine I should have missed our very interesting conversation. That young man is very much in love with you"--he looked amusedly at the growing red in her face. "He is very much in love with you," he repeated. "What a pity! What a thousand pities!"

"How soon will this drug begin to act?" she asked.

"Are you frightened?"

"No, but I should welcome anything which made me oblivious to your presence--you are not exactly a pleasant companion," she said, with a return to the old tone he knew so well.

"Content yourself, little person," he said with simulated affection. "You will soon be rid of me."

"Why do you want to marry me?"

"I can tell you that now," he said: "Because you are a very rich woman and I want your money, half of which comes to me on my marriage."

"Then the man spoke the truth!" She sat up suddenly, but the effort made her head swim.

He caught her by the shoulders and laid her ge............