Not a word came from the white lips of the girl, but the scorn of her eyes was fiery enough to make him hurry from her presence with a stifled oath.
She saw him leave with a great strangling sob of relief, and murmured:
"Thank Heaven, he will not come again for a week. Something will surely happen in all that time."
But she did not know yet all the horrors that week held in store for her, or why Clifford Standish had smiled so grimly, when he spoke of old Jane's advocacy of his suit.
Each day the cruel woman presented herself with the harsh question:
Geraldine always answered "Never!" and each time the old woman flew at her in a fury, and administered a severe beating.
"He told me to do it," she would exclaim, angrily.
The prints of her cruel hands would be left on Geraldine's tender face in crimson streaks; her arms and shoulders bore purple bruises on their whiteness, but though each day brought a more severe chastisement than the last, Geraldine's answer was still the same:
Her daily portions of food grew less in quantity, and more inferior in quality, so that only the severest pangs of hunger forced her to swallow the coarse mess. But for the hope of rescue, she would have left it untouched, and starved herself.
The old fiend began also to neglect the fire, so that the freezing winter winds, as they swept across the snow-covered prairie land, penetrated the cracks of the old frame house and chilled poor Geraldine until her fair face looked blue and pinched from the cold.
"I shall beat, and starve, and freeze you into consent!" snarled wicked old Jane, in a rage at the girl's stubbornness.
"You may kill my body, but you cannot bend my will!" answered the resolute victim.
But from weakness of the body her hopefulness began to fail. She cried out that God had forgotten her; she ceased to pray for rescue; she asked only that death would come quickly.
But the slow days and nights dragged on till the week was at an end, and still the strength of youth kept life in her sore and aching frame.
Late that afternoon old Jane came up stairs.
"He is coming. I see the sleigh off in the distance now. He will bring the justice to marry you to him!" she snarled.
Geraldine did not answer; she had already been beaten and kicked that day so that she was barely able to rise from the chair where she was crouching.