ffort to command himself.

And Sir Beverley, feeling the dumb strength that opposed him, resenting
the forbearance with which he was confronted, infuriated by the
unexpected force of the boy's resistance, turned with a snarl to seize
and desecrate that which he had been warned was holy.

"As for this designing woman, I tell you, she is not for you,--not, that
is, in any honourable sense. If you choose to make a fool of her, that's
your affair. I suppose you'll sow the usual crop of wild oats before
you've done. But as to marrying her--"

"By God, sir!" broke in Piers passionately. "Do you imagine that I
propose to do anything else?"

The words came from him like a cry wrung from a man in torture, and as he
uttered them the last of his self-control slipped from his grasp. With a
face gone suddenly devilish, he strode round the table and stood before
his grandfather, furiously threatening.

"I have warned you!" he said, and his voice was low, sunk almost to a
whisper. "You can say what you like of me. I'm used to it. But--if you
speak evil of her--I'll treat you as I would any other blackguard who
dared to insult her. And now that we are on the subject, I will tell you
this. If I do not marry this woman whom I love--I swear that I will
never marry at all! That is my final word!"

He hurled the last sentence in Sir Beverley's face, and with it he would
have swung round upon his heel; but something in that face detained him.

Sir Beverley's eyes were shining with an icy, intolerable sparkle. His
thin lips were drawn in the dreadful semblance of a smile. He was
half-a-head taller than Piers, and he seemed to tower above him in that
moment of conflict.

"Wait a minute!" he said. "Wait a minute!"

His right hand was feeling along the leathern surface of the
writing-table, but neither his eyes nor Piers' followed the movement.
They held each other in a fixed, unalterable glare.

There followed several moments of complete and terrible silence--a
silence more fraught with violence than any speech.

Then, with a slight jerk, Sir Beverley leaned towards Piers. "So," he
said, "you defy me, do you?"

His voice was as grim as his look. A sudden, odd sense of fear went
through Piers. Sharply the thought ran through his mind that the same
Evesham devil possessed them both. It was as if he had caught a glimpse
of the monster gibing at his elbow, goading him, goading them, both.

He made a sharp, involuntary movement; he al