"Mademoiselle has not been injured?" Lanyard enquired, solicitous.
The girl coughed and gasped, shaking her head, enunciating with difficulty
in little better than a husky whisper: "... roughly handled, nothing
worse."
Lanyard's face burned as if his blood were molten mercury. "_Nothing
worse_!" Appreciation of what handling she must have suffered, if she had
resisted at all, before those beasts could have bound her, excited an
indignation from whose light, as it blazed in Lanyard's eyes, even Ekstrom
winced.
The hand was tremulous with which he sought to loose her wrists, so much so
that she could not but notice.
"Don't mind me--look to that man!" she begged. "Leave me to unfasten these
with my teeth. He can't be trusted for a single instant."
"Mademoiselle," Lanyard mumbled, instinctively employing the French
idiom--"you have reason."
For an instant only he hesitated, swayed this way and that by the maddest
of impulses, then resigned himself absolutely to their ascendancy.
"This goes beyond all bounds," he said in an undertone.
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