“I wonder you are not afraid to behave to me in this manner,” he said, at length, lifting his head with a spasmodic jerk, and raising to mine his mottled, angry eyes, now cold and hard as pebbles, “seeing that you are, so to speak, in the hollow of my hand;” and, suiting the action to the word, he extended his long, spongy, right hand, and closed it crushingly, as though it contained a worm, while he smiled and sneered—­oh, such a sneer! it seemed to fill the room.

“True, true—­I am very helpless,” I said, sitting down with a sudden revulsion of feeling, and, clasping my hands above my eyes, I wept aloud, adding, a moment later, as I indignantly wiped my tears:  “Yes, if the worst betide, there will only be one more martyr; and, what is martyrdom, that any need shrink from it?  The world is full of it!”

“Nothing, if you are used to it,” he said, carelessly, “as the old woman remarked of the eels she was skinning alive; I suppose you know all about it by this time.  But come, you are rational again, now, and I don’t wish to be hard on you, Miriam; I don’t, upon my soul!”

“Your soul!” I murmured—–­“your soul!” I reiterated louder; and I smiled at the idea that suggested itself—­“have reptiles souls?”

“The memory of your father alone, my old, confiding friend, one of the most perfect of men, as I always thought him, would incline me kindly to his daughter, even if no other tie existed between us,” he said calmly, unmindful of my sarcasm.  “But other ties do exist, mistaken girl!  The world looks upon us as one family—­since the marriage of Claude and Evelyn, that uncongenial union which, but for your caprice, would never have taken place, and which is at the root of all our misfortunes, all our fatal necessities.”

“Necessities!” I muttered, between my clinched teeth, drumming with my fingers impatiently on the table before me, and smiling scornfully a moment later.

“You seem in a mood for iteration, to-day, Miss Monfort.”

“I make my running commentaries in that way, Mr. Bainrothe.  But a truce to recrimination and reminiscence both.  Let us adhere strictly to the letter and verse of our affairs.  These papers form the subject of your visit, I believe.  Know, at once, that the first I will sign, on certain conditions, bitter and humiliating as I feel it to be obliged to do this; but, that I will ever consent to yield the guardianship of my sister wholly to Evelyn Erie and her husband, or divest myself of my house and furniture, or my wild lands in Georgia, to you, here first named to me, in consideration of expenses already incurred and to be incurred for Mabel’s education, and my own safe-keeping, during a long attack of lunacy; or that I will, to crown the whole iniquitous requisition, consent to give my hand in marriage to that scoundrel—­Luke Gregory!—­are visions as vain as those of the child who tried to grasp a comet or the moon—­or, to descend in comparison, to catch a bird by putting salt on its tail!  There, you have my ultimatum; now go and make the best of it!”