“It cannot be as bad as all that,” Lord Springdale said.
“It is worse,” she replied. “It is no use you trying to make it sound better. Just as my friends tell me that he is a very nice man and I have to make the best of it.”
She gave an exclamation before she went on,
“I have to marry him, not them! I know I will kill myself rather than let him touch me.”
“Surely,” Lord Springdale said, “if you talk to your father and tell him that you feel like this, he will not make you do anything so distasteful and degrading.”
“I know my father,” Mellina replied. “If he makes up his mind he never changes it. That is why he is so rich, because he is so insistent he knows that he will win in the end.”
“Then you will definitely have to run away. Where can you go?”
“That is what I am asking you,” Me
