“Then you cannot make me eat,” retorted Dorothy.

“Ah, you would answer me, would you, you brazen, insolent huzzy,” cried her father, angrily.

Dorothy held up her hand warningly to Sir George, and uttered the one word, “Father.”  Her voice sounded like the clear, low ring of steel as I have heard it in the stillness of sunrise during a duel to the death.  Madge gently placed her hand in Dorothy’s, but the caress met no response.

“Go to your room,” answered Sir George.

Dorothy rose to her feet and spoke calmly:  “I have not said that I would disobey you in regard to this marriage which you have sought for me; and your harshness, father, grows out of your effort to reconcile your conscience with the outrage you would put upon your own flesh and blood—­your only child.”

“Suffering God!” cried Sir George, frenzied with anger and drink.  “Am I to endure such insolence from my own child?  The lawyers will be here to-morrow.  The contract will be signed, and, thank God, I shall soon be rid of you.  I’ll place you in the hands of one who will break your damnable will and curb your vixenish temper.”  Then he turned to Lady Crawford.  “Dorothy, if there is anything to do in the way of gowns and women’s trumpery in preparation for the wedding, begin at once, for the ceremony shall come off within a fortnight.”

This was beyond Dorothy’s power to endure.  Madge felt the storm coming and clutched her by the arm in an effort to stop her, but nothing could have done that.

“I marry Lord Stanley?” she asked in low, bell-like tones, full of contempt and disdain.  “Marry that creature?  Father, you don’t know me.”

“By God, I know myself,” retorted Sir George, “and I say—­”

“Now hear me, father,” she interrupted in a manner that silenced even him.  She bent forward, resting one fair hand upon the table, while she held out her other arm bared to the elbow.  “Hear what I say and take it for the truth as if it had come from Holy Writ.  I will open the veins in this arm and will strew my blood in a gapless circle around Haddon Hall so that you shall tread upon it whenever you go forth into the day or into the night before I will marry the drunken idiot with whom you would curse me.  Ay, I will do more.  I will kill you, if need be, should you try to force him on me.  Now, father, we understand each other.  At least you cannot fail to understand me.  For the last time I warn you.  Beware of me.”

She gently pushed the chair back from the table, quietly adjusted the sleeve which she had drawn upward from her wrist, and slowly walked out of the room, softly humming the refrain of a roundelay.  There was no trace of excitement about the girl.  Her brain was acting with the ease and precision of a perfectly constructed machine.  Sir George, by his violence and cruelty, had made a fiend of this strong, passionate, tender heart.  That was all.

The supper, of course, was quickly finished, and the ladies left the room.