"But for hearing, I
choose the part this gentleman has chosen--to go from your presence.
What?" looking at the Colonel with white cheeks and flaming
eyes--Asgill had turned to go from the room--"has it come to this? That
we must seek your leave to live, to breathe, to have a guest, to eat
and sleep, and perhaps to die? Then I say--then I say, if this be so,
we have no choice but to go. This is no place for us!"

"Flavia!"

"Ah, do not call me that!" she retorted. "My hope, joy, honour, are in
this house, and you have disgraced it! My brother is a McMurrough, and
what have you made of him? He cowers before your eye! He has no will
but yours! He is as good as dumb--before his master! You flog us like
children, but you forget that we are grown, and that it is more than
the body that smarts. It is shame we feel--shame so bitter that if a
look could lay you dead at my feet, though it cost us all, though it
left us beggared, I would look it joyfully--were I alone! But you,
cowardly interloper, a schemer living on our impotence, walk on and
trample upon us----"

"Enough," Colonel Sullivan cried, intolerable pain in his voice. "You
win! You have a heart harder than the millstone, more set than ice! I
call you to witness I have struggled hard, I have struggled hard,
girl----"

"For the mastery," she cried venomously. "And for your master, the
devil!"

"No," he replied, more quietly. "I think for God. If I was wrong, may
He forgive me!"

"I never will!" she protested.

"I shall not ask for your forgiveness," he retorted. He looked at her
silently, and then, in an altered tone, "The more," he said, "as my
mind is changed again. Ay, thank God, changed again. A minute ago I was
weak; now I am strong, and I will do my duty as I have set myself to do
it. When I came here I came to be a peacemaker, I came to save the
great from his folly and the poor from his ignorance, to shield the
house of my fathers from ruin and my kin from the gaol and the gibbet.
And I stand here still, and I shall persist--I shall persist."

"You will?" she exclaimed.

"I shall! I shall remain and persist."

Passion choked her. She could not find words. After all she had said he
would persist. He was not to be moved--he would persist. He would still
trample upon them, still be master. The house was no longer theirs, nor
was anything theirs. They were to have no life, no will, no
freedom--while he lived. Ah, while he lived. She made an odd gesture