With flashing eyes and a voice that smote him like a whip, she cried out, "Leave me alone, please!" He fell back against the wall, and she passed on and up the stairway, leaving him leaning there in dismay, his jaw lax.
The mother hastily followed, and as the door closed behind them Viola turned with blazing eyes. "This is horrible--disgraceful! I hope you enjoy being treated like that! How can you endure it? How can you ask me to endure it? If Anthony Clarke possessed one shred of real manhood--But he hasn't. He's so selfishly bent on his own plans he's willing to let me suffer anything. I'm done with him, mother. You needn't try to find excuse for him. I don't see how I endured him so long. He must never touch me again."
"Don't do anything rash, child."
"Will you submit to more insult? You can stay on till you are ordered out of the house if you like, but I will not!"
"But you know they advise it."
The girl turned, a new tone in her voice. "There, now, mother, we come back to that again! I'm tired of hearing that. If they insist on our staying here I will be sure they are the voices of devils and not those they claim to be. I don't believe my father would ask me to stay in a house where the very servants sniff at us. I don't believe he would let Anthony make use of me in this way. Professor Serviss calls our faith a delusion, and to-night I almost hope he's right. I have lost the spirit of the martyr, and everything seems foolish to me."
Mrs. Lambert regarded her daughter with horror. "Child, some earth-bound spirit has surely taken possession of you."
"I hope it will stay till to-morrow--till I get out of this house," she replied, and went to her own room without a good-night kiss, leaving her mother hurt and dismayed.
A few moments later Clarke knocked at the sitting-room door. "Julia, here is a message I want you to give to Viola."
As she opened to him he faced her, pale and tremulous, all his anger, all his resolution gone. "She was unjust to me," he said, humbly; "take her this." He extended a folded leaf of paper in a hand that partook of the pallor of his face.
"You poor boy," she exclaimed, her heart wrung by his suffering, "you mustn't mind what she said--it was only a girlish pet."
"Mother," he cried, passionately, "to lose her now would kill me. She is my hope, my stay, my God! She has stabbed me to the heart to-night. Did she mean it? She can't mean it!"