I remembered how once she had called him a devil.

I remembered, too, uncomfortably, the scrap of conversation I had overheard between Boyce and herself in the hall.

She had lashed him with her scorn, and he had taken his whipping without much show of fight.

Still, a woman's love, especially that of a lady barbarian, was a curiously complex affair, and had been known to impel her to trample on a man one minute and the next to fall at his feet.

Now the worm she had trampled on had turned; stood erect as a properly authenticated hero.