For answer, he seized her by the hands, and drew her toward the light.  There, for a few intolerable seconds he looked closely, with a kind of savage curiosity, into her face, studying her features, her hair, her light form.  Then pushing her from him, he opened that same drawer in the French cabinet that Undershaw had once seen him open, fumbled a little, and took out something that glittered.

“Take that.  But if you come here again it will be the worse for you, and for your mother.  When I say a thing I mean it.  Now, go!  Dixon shall take you to the train.”

Felicia glanced at the Renaissance jewel in her hand—­delicate Venus in gold and pearl, set in a hoop of diamonds.  “I won’t have it!” she said, dashing it from her with a sob of passion.  “And we won’t take your money either—­not a farthing!  We’ve got friends who’ll help us.  And I’ll keep my mother myself.  You shan’t give her anything—­nor my grandfather.  So you needn’t threaten us!  You can’t do us any harm!”

She looked him scornfully over from head to foot, a little fury, with blazing eyes.

Melrose laughed.

“I thought you came to get a dot out of me,” he said, with lifted brows, admiring her in spite of himself.  “You seem to have a good spice of the Melrose temper in you.  I’m sorry I can’t treat you as you seem to wish.  Your mother settled that.  Well—­that’ll do—­that’ll do!  We can’t bandy words any more.  Dixon!”

He touched the hand-bell beside him.

Felicia hurried to the door, sobbing with excitement.  As she reached it Dixon entered.  Melrose spoke a few peremptory words to him, and she found herself walking through the gallery, Dixon’s hand on her arm, while he muttered and lamented beside her.

“‘And the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart.’  Aye, it’s the Lord—­it’s the Lord.  Oh!  Missie, Missie—­I was a fool to let yo’ in.  Yo’ve been nowt but a new stone o’ stumblin’; an’ the Lord knows there’s offences enoof already!”

Meanwhile, in the room from which his daughter had been driven, Melrose had risen from his seat, and was moving hither and thither, every now and then taking up some object in the crowded tables, pretending to look at it, and putting it down again.  He was pursued, tormented all the while by swarming thoughts—­visualizations.  That child would outlive him—­her father—­perhaps by a half century.  The flesh and blood sprung from his own life, would go on enjoying and adventuring, for fifty years, perhaps, after he had been laid in his resented grave.  And the mind which would have had no existence had he not lived, would hold till death the remembrance of what he had just said and done—­a child’s only remembrance of her father.