“Sir!” blazed forth Piers.

He leaned across the table with a face gone suddenly white, and struck his own fist upon the polished oak with a passionate force that compelled attention.

Sir Beverley ceased his tirade in momentary astonishment.  Such violence from Piers was unusual.

Instantly Piers went on speaking, his voice quick and low, quivering with the agitation that he had no time to subdue.  “I won’t hear another word on that subject!  You hear me, sir?  Not one word!  It is sacred, and as such I will have it treated.”

But the check upon Sir Beverley was but brief, and the flame of his anger burned all the more fiercely in consequence of it.  He broke in upon those few desperate words of Piers’ with redoubled fury.

“You will have this, and you won’t have that!  Confound you!  What the devil do you mean?  Are you master in this house, or am I?”

“I am master where my own actions are concerned,” threw back Piers.  “And what I do—­what I decide to do—­is my affair alone.”

Swiftly he uttered the words.  His breathing came quick and short as the breathing of a man hard pressed.  He seemed to be holding back every straining nerve with a blind force that was physical rather than mental.

He drew himself suddenly erect as he spoke.  He had flung down the gauntlet of his independence at last, and with clenched hands he waited for the answer to his challenge.

It came upon him like a whirlwind.  Sir Beverley uttered an oath that fell with the violence of a blow, and after it a tornado of furious speech against which it was futile to attempt to raise any protest.  He could only stand as it were at bay, like an animal protecting its own, fiery-veined, quivering, yet holding back from the spring.

Not for any insult to himself would he quit that attitude.  He was striving desperately to keep his self-control.  He had been within an ace of losing it, as the blood that oozed over his closed fist testified; but, for the sake of that manhood which he was seeking to assert, he made a Titanic effort to command himself.

And Sir Beverley, feeling the dumb strength that opposed him, resenting the forbearance with which he was confronted, infuriated by the unexpected force of the boy’s resistance, turned with a snarl to seize and desecrate that which he had been warned was holy.

“As for this designing woman, I tell you, she is not for you,—­not, that is, in any honourable sense.  If you choose to make a fool of her, that’s your affair.  I suppose you’ll sow the usual crop of wild oats before you’ve done.  But as to marrying her—­”

“By God, sir!” broke in Piers passionately.  “Do you imagine that I propose to do anything else?”

The words came from him like a cry wrung from a man in torture, and as he uttered them the last of his self-control slipped from his grasp.  With a face gone suddenly devilish, he strode round the table and stood before his grandfather, furiously threatening.