“But not as your wife?”

“Not as Countess of Scroope.”

“You would have her as your mistress, then?” As she asked this question the tone of her voice was altogether altered, and the threatening lion-look had returned to her eyes.  They were now near the seat, confronted to each other; and the fury of her bosom, which for a while had been dominated by the tenderness of the love for her daughter, was again raging within her.  Was it possible that he should be able to treat them thus,—­that he should break his word and go from them scathless, happy, joyous, with all the delights of the world before him, leaving them crushed into dust beneath his feet.  She had been called upon from her youth upwards to bear injustice,—­but of all injustice surely this would be the worst.  “As your mistress,” she repeated,—­“and I her mother, am to stand by and see it, and know that my girl is dishonoured!  Would your mother have borne that for your sister?  How would it be if your sister were as that girl is now?”

“I have no sister.”

“And therefore you are thus hard-hearted.  She shall never be your harlot;—­never.  I would myself sooner take from her the life I gave her.  You have destroyed her, but she shall never be a thing so low as that.”

“I will marry her,—­in a foreign land.”

“And why not here?  She is as good as you.  Why should she not bear the name you are so proud of dinning into our ears?  Why should she not be a Countess?  Has she ever disgraced herself?  If she is disgraced in your eyes you must be a Devil.”

“It is not that,” he said hoarsely.

“What is it?  What has she done that she should be thus punished?  Tell me, man, that she shall be your lawful wife.”  As she said this she caught him roughly by the collar of his coat and shook him with her arm.

“It cannot be so,” said the Earl Of Scroope.

“It cannot be so!  But I say it shall,—­or,—­or—!  What are you, that she should be in your hands like this?  Say that she shall be your wife, or you shall never live to speak to another woman.”  The peril of his position on the top of the cliff had not occurred to him;—­nor did it occur to him now.  He had been there so often that the place gave him no sense of danger.  Nor had that peril,—­as it was thought afterwards by those who most closely made inquiry on the matter,—­ever occurred to her.  She had not brought him there that she might frighten him with that danger, or that she might avenge herself by the power which it gave her.  But now the idea flashed across her maddened mind.  “Miscreant,” she said.  And she bore him back to the very edge of the precipice.

“You’ll have me over the cliff,” he exclaimed hardly even yet putting out his strength against her.

“And so I will, by the help of God.  Now think of her!  Now think of her!” And as she spoke she pressed him backwards towards his fall.  He had power enough to bend his knee, and to crouch beneath her grasp on to the loose crumbling soil of the margin of the rocks.  He still held her by her cuff and it seemed for a moment as though she must go with him.  But, on a sudden, she spurned him with her foot on the breast, the rag of cloth parted in his hand, and the poor wretch tumbled forth alone into eternity.