Galen Albret, in a crescendo
outburst. "Silence! I will not be gainsaid! You have made your
choice! You are no longer a daughter of mine!"

"Father!" cried Virginia, faintly, her lips going pale.

"Don't speak to me! Don't look at me! Get out of here! Get out
of the place! I won't have you here another day--another hour!
By----"

The girl hesitated for a moment, then ran to him, sinking on her
knees, and clasping his hand.

"Father," she pleaded, "you are not yourself. This has been very
trying to you. To-morrow you will be sorry. But then it will be
too late. Think, while there is yet time. He has not committed a
crime. You yourself told me he was a man of intelligence and
daring--a gentleman; and surely, though he has been hasty, he has
acted with a brave spirit through it all. See, he will promise you
to go away quietly, to say nothing of all this, never to come into
this country again without your permission. He will do this if I
ask him, for he loves me. Look at me, father. Are you going to
treat your little girl so--your Virginia? You have never refused
me anything before. And this is the greatest thing in all my
life." She held his hand to her cheek and stroked it, murmuring
little feminine, caressing phrases, secure in her power of
witchery, which had never failed her before. The sound of her own
voice reassured her, the quietude of the man she pleaded with. A
lifetime of petting, of indulgence, threw its soothing influence
over her perturbation, convincing her that somehow all this storm
and stress must be phantasmagoric--a dream from which she was even
now awakening into a clearer day of happiness. "For you love me,
father," she concluded, and looked up daintily, with a pathetic,
coquettish tilt of her fair head, to peer into his face.

Galen Albret snarled like a wild beast, throwing aside the girl, as
he did the chair in which he had been sitting. Ned Trent caught
her, reeling, in his arms.

For as is often the case with passionate but strong temperaments,
though the Factor had attained a certain calm of control, the
turmoil of his deeper anger had not been in the least stilled.
Over it a crust of determination had formed--the determination to
make an end by the directest means in his autocratic power of this
galling opposition. The girl's pleading, instead of appealing to
him, had in reality but stirred his fury the more profoundly. It
had added a new fuel element to the