“Say, you look here—­I done what you told me to do, didn’t I?  I ain’t no more nor no less a lady than I was before I done it, am I?  What you pickin’ on me for, then?  What more you want?”

He sighed.  Milly’s niece was distinctly difficult, to say the least.  How, he asked himself desperately, was one to make a dent in her appalling ignorance?  She irritated him.  And as is usual with people who do not understand, he took exactly the wrong course with her.

“I want you at least to try to live up to your position,” he said with cold directness, beetling his brows at her.  “I want you to do what you’re told—­and to keep on doing it!  Do you understand that?” He felt that he was allowing himself to be more wrought up than was good for him, and this added to his annoyance.

She considered this, sullenly.  “I’m not exackly straight in my mind what I understand and what I don’t understand, yet,” she replied.  “But I got this much straight:  If I done what I done to please you, I done it to please me, too!”

This was logical enough; it had even a note of common sense and justice.  But her crude method of expressing it filled him with cold fury.  The Champneys temper strained at the leash.

“Ah!” said he, a dark flush staining his face, “ah!  Then get this straight, too:  you’ll please me only if you carry out your part of our contract.  What! do you dream I would ruin my nephew’s life for a self-willed, undisciplined minx?  Nothing could be farther from my thoughts!  Nancy, I made you Mrs. Peter Champneys:  you will qualify for the position—­or lose it!” He tapped his foot on the floor, and glared at her.

Nancy gave him glare for glare.  “Yeah, you said it!  You made me Mrs. Peter Champneys, and all I got to do is to do what I don’t want to do, to hold down the job!  What you askin’ him to do to please me?  How’s he qualifyin’?  Is he so much I’m nothin’?  Because that’s what he thinks!  Oh, you needn’t talk!  I guess I got eyes, at least!”

“I suggest that you use them to your own advantage, then,” said he, disgustedly.  “Let us have done with such squabbling!  You agreed to obey.  Very well, then, you will do so, or I shall take steps to put you outside of my calculations.  In other words, I will wash my hands of you.  Is that perfectly clear to you?” How else, he asked himself, was he to make her understand?

She saw that he was in a towering rage, and she reflected that if she had made Baxter that mad he’d have banged her with his fists.  For a long minute the two stared at each other.  She was about to make a defiant reply and let come what might, when a sort of spasm distorted his face.  His mouth opened gaspingly, his eyes rolled back in his head like a dying man’s.  He seemed to crumple up, and she caught him as he fell.  Her terrified shriek brought Hoichi, who took instant charge of the situation.  He made the unconscious man comfortable on a divan, applied such restoratives as were at hand, and directed a frightened maid to telephone for physicians.