The instant he spoke those words, Laura threw down the pen—­looked at him with an expression in her eyes which, throughout all my experience of her, I had never seen in them before, and turned her back on him in dead silence.

This strong expression of the most open and the most bitter contempt was so entirely unlike herself, so utterly out of her character, that it silenced us all.  There was something hidden, beyond a doubt, under the mere surface-brutality of the words which her husband had just addressed to her.  There was some lurking insult beneath them, of which I was wholly ignorant, but which had left the mark of its profanation so plainly on her face that even a stranger might have seen it.

The Count, who was no stranger, saw it as distinctly as I did.  When I left my chair to join Laura, I heard him whisper under his breath to Sir Percival, “You idiot!”

Laura walked before me to the door as I advanced, and at the same time her husband spoke to her once more.

“You positively refuse, then, to give me your signature?” he said, in the altered tone of a man who was conscious that he had let his own licence of language seriously injure him.

“After what you have just said to me,” she replied firmly, “I refuse my signature until I have read every line in that parchment from the first word to the last.  Come away, Marian, we have remained here long enough.”

“One moment!” interposed the Count before Sir Percival could speak again—­“one moment, Lady Glyde, I implore you!”

Laura would have left the room without noticing him, but I stopped her.

“Don’t make an enemy of the Count!” I whispered.  “Whatever you do, don’t make an enemy of the Count!”

She yielded to me.  I closed the door again, and we stood near it waiting.  Sir Percival sat down at the table, with his elbow on the folded parchment, and his head resting on his clenched fist.  The Count stood between us—­master of the dreadful position in which we were placed, as he was master of everything else.

“Lady Glyde,” he said, with a gentleness which seemed to address itself to our forlorn situation instead of to ourselves, “pray pardon me if I venture to offer one suggestion, and pray believe that I speak out of my profound respect and my friendly regard for the mistress of this house.”  He turned sharply towards Sir Percival.  “Is it absolutely necessary,” he asked “that this thing here, under your elbow, should be signed to-day?”

“It is necessary to my plans and wishes,” returned the other sulkily.  “But that consideration, as you may have noticed, has no influence with Lady Glyde.”

“Answer my plain question plainly.  Can the business of the signature be put off till to-morrow—­Yes or No?”

“Yes, if you will have it so.”

“Then what are you wasting your time for here?  Let the signature wait till to-morrow—­let it wait till you come back.”