which
was too dreadful a thing to suppose!) were long brass filigree earrings.

"I'm just off, aunt," said Ann Veronica.

"Your father is in the study and wishes to speak to you."

Ann Veronica hesitated, and then stood in the open doorway and regarded
her father's stern presence. She spoke with an entirely false note of
cheerful off-handedness. "I'm just in time to say good-bye before I go,
father. I'm going up to London with the Widgetts to that ball."

"Now look here, Ann Veronica," said Mr. Stanley, "just a moment. You are
NOT going to that ball!"

Ann Veronica tried a less genial, more dignified note.

"I thought we had discussed that, father."

"You are not going to that ball! You are not going out of this house in
that get-up!"

Ann Veronica tried yet more earnestly to treat him, as she would treat
any man, with an insistence upon her due of masculine respect. "You
see," she said, very gently, "I AM going. I am sorry to seem to disobey
you, but I am. I wish"--she found she had embarked on a bad sentence--"I
wish we needn't have quarrelled."

She stopped abruptly, and turned about toward the front door. In a
moment he was beside her. "I don't think you can have heard me, Vee,"
he said, with intensely controlled fury. "I said you were"--he
shouted--"NOT TO GO!"

She made, and overdid, an immense effort to be a princess. She tossed
her head, and, having no further words, moved toward the door. Her
father intercepted her, and for a moment she and he struggled with their
hands upon the latch. A common rage flushed their faces. "Let go!" she
gasped at him, a blaze of anger.

"Veronica!" cried Miss Stanley, warningly, and, "Peter!"

For a moment they seemed on the verge of an altogether desperate
scuffle. Never for a moment had violence come between these two since
long ago he had, in spite of her mother's protest in the background,
carried her kicking and squalling to the nursery for some forgotten
crime. With something near to horror they found themselves thus
confronted.

The door was fastened by a catch and a latch with an inside key, to
which at night a chain and two bolts were added. Carefully abstaining
from thrusting against each other, Ann Veronica and her father began an
absurdly desperate struggle, the one to open the door, the other to keep
it fastened. She seized the key, and he grasped her hand and squeezed
it roughly and painfully between the handle and the ward as she tried to
turn it.