"Keep your love. Did I ever ask for it?"

Paul's voice rang out. His face was a taut sculpture, chiseled out of stone-as she felt certain his heart was.

"No," Domini threw at him, "but you're not quite so inhuman as to enjoy for very long the companionship of a wife who hates you!"

She couldn't weep. Tears had set like ice in her and the sweetness of today had turned to bitterness. The rings on her hands felt heavy-like manacles, she told herself. Shackles that bound her to a man who had forced her into a loveless disaster of a marriage.