er!"

"Stop your indecent ravings!" ordered Sir Nigel, shaking her. "I will
not submit to be disgraced before the servants."

"Put your hand over her mouth, Nigel," cried his mother. "The very
scullery maids will hear."

She was as infuriated as her son. And, indeed, to behold civilised human
beings in the state of uncontrolled violence these three had reached was
a sight to shudder at.

"I won't stop," cried the girl. "Why did you take me away from
everything--I was quite happy. Everybody was kind to me. I loved people,
I had everything. No one ever--ever--ever ill-used anyone----"

Sir Nigel clutched her arm more brutally still and shook her with
absolute violence. Her hair broke loose and fell about her awful little
distorted, sobbing face.

"I did not take you to give you an opportunity to display your vulgar
ostentation by throwing away hundred-pound cheques to villagers," he
said. "I didn't take you to give you the position of a lady and be made
a fool of by you."

"You have ruined him," burst forth his mother. "You have put it out of
his power to marry an Englishwoman who would have known it was her duty
to give something in return for his name and protection."

Her ladyship had begun to rave also, and as mother and son were of equal
violence when they had ceased to control themselves, Rosalie began to
find herself enlightened unsparingly. She and her people were vulgar
sharpers. They had trapped a gentleman into a low American marriage and
had not the decency to pay for what they had got. If she had been an
Englishwoman, well born, and of decent breeding, all her fortune would
have been properly transferred to her husband and he would have had the
dispensing of it. Her husband would have been in the position to control
her expenditure and see that she did not make a fool of herself. As it
was she was the derision of all decent people, of all people who had
been properly brought up and knew what was in good taste and of good
morality.

First it was the Dowager who poured forth, and then it was Sir
Nigel. They broke in on each other, they interrupted one another with
exclamations and interpolations. They had so far lost themselves that
they did not know they became grotesque in the violence of their fury.
Rosalie's brain whirled. Her hysteria mounted and mounted. She stared
first at one and then at the other, gasping and sobbing by turns; she
swayed on her feet and clutched at a chair.

"I did not kno