“I have warned you!” he said, and his voice was low, sunk almost to a whisper.  “You can say what you like of me.  I’m used to it.  But—­if you speak evil of her—­I’ll treat you as I would any other blackguard who dared to insult her.  And now that we are on the subject, I will tell you this.  If I do not marry this woman whom I love—­I swear that I will never marry at all!  That is my final word!”

He hurled the last sentence in Sir Beverley’s face, and with it he would have swung round upon his heel; but something in that face detained him.

Sir Beverley’s eyes were shining with an icy, intolerable sparkle.  His thin lips were drawn in the dreadful semblance of a smile.  He was half-a-head taller than Piers, and he seemed to tower above him in that moment of conflict.

“Wait a minute!” he said.  “Wait a minute!”

His right hand was feeling along the leathern surface of the writing-table, but neither his eyes nor Piers’ followed the movement.  They held each other in a fixed, unalterable glare.

There followed several moments of complete and terrible silence—­a silence more fraught with violence than any speech.

Then, with a slight jerk, Sir Beverley leaned towards Piers.  “So,” he said, “you defy me, do you?”

His voice was as grim as his look.  A sudden, odd sense of fear went through Piers.  Sharply the thought ran through his mind that the same Evesham devil possessed them both.  It was as if he had caught a glimpse of the monster gibing at his elbow, goading him, goading them, both.

He made a sharp, involuntary movement; he almost flinched from those pitiless, stony eyes.

“Ha!” Sir Beverley uttered a brief and very bitter laugh.  “You’ve begun to think better of it, eh?”

“No, sir.”  Curtly Piers made answer, speaking because he must.  “I meant what I said, and I shall stick to it.  But it wasn’t for the sake of defying you that I said it.  I have a better reason than that.”

He was still quivering with anger, yet because of that gibing devil at his elbow he strove to speak temperately, strove to hold back the raging flood of fierce resentment that threatened to overwhelm him.

As for Sir Beverley, he had never attempted to control himself in moments such as these, and he did not attempt to do so now.  Before Piers’ words were fairly uttered, he had raised his right hand and in it a stout, two-foot ruler that he had taken from the writing-table.

“Take that then, you young dog!” he shouted, and struck Piers furiously, as he stood.  “And that!  And that!”

The third blow never fell.  It was caught in mid-air by Piers who, with eyes that literally flamed in his white face, sprang straight at his grandfather, and closed with him.

There was a brief—­a very brief—­struggle, then a gasping oath from Sir Beverley as the ruler was torn from his grasp.  The next moment he was free and tottering blindly.  Piers, with an awful smile, swung the weapon back as if he would strike him down with it.  Then, as Sir Beverley clutched instinctively at the nearest chair for support, he flung savagely round on his heel, altering his purpose.  There followed the loud crack of rending wood as he broke the ruler passionately across his knee, putting forth all his strength, and the clatter of the falling fragments as he hurled them violently from him.