o more masters, no more
servants, no more horses for me--I said to myself: Is that all? I
should have laughed if I hadn't been too afraid of her to make the least
little sound."

It seemed that poor Flora had to know all the possible phases of that
sort of anguish, beginning with instinctive panic, through the
bewildered stage, the frozen stage and the stage of blanched
apprehension, down to the instinctive prudence of extreme terror--the
stillness of the mouse. But when she heard herself called the child of
a cheat and a swindler, the very monstrous unexpectedness of this caused
in her a revulsion towards letting herself go. She screamed out all at
once "You mustn't speak like this of Papa!"

The effort of it uprooted her from that spot where her little feet
seemed dug deep into the thick luxurious carpet, and she retreated
backwards to a distant part of the room, hearing herself repeat, "You
mustn't, you mustn't," as if it were somebody else screaming. She came
to a chair and flung herself into it. Thereupon the somebody else
ceased screaming and she lolled, exhausted, sightless, in a silent room,
as if indifferent to everything and without a single thought in her
head.

The next few seconds seemed to last for ever so long; a black abyss of
time separating what was past and gone from the reappearance of the
governess and the reawakening of fear. And that woman was forcing the
words through her set teeth:

"You say I mustn't, I mustn't. All the world will be speaking of him
like this to-morrow. They will say it, and they'll print it. You shall
hear it and you shall read it--and then you shall know whose daughter
you are."

Her face lighted up with an atrocious satisfaction. "He's nothing but a
thief," she cried, "this father of yours. As to you I have never been
deceived in you for a moment. I have been growing more and more sick of
you for years. You are a vulgar, silly nonentity, and you shall go back
to where you belong, whatever low place you have sprung from, and beg
your bread--that is if anybody's charity will have anything to do with
you, which I doubt--"

She would have gone on regardless of the enormous eyes, of the open
mouth of the girl who sat up suddenly with the wild staring expression
of being choked by invisible fingers on her throat, and yet horribly
pale. The effect on her constitution was so profound, Mrs Fyne told
me, that she who as a child had a rather pretty delicate colour