!" roared Mrs. Tarrant.

"Selfishness! Mrs. Tarrant, do you suppose I pretend not to be selfish?"

"Do you want us all murdered by the mob, then?"

"They can have their money--can't you give them back their money?" cried
Verena, turning frantically round the circle.

"Verena Tarrant, you don't mean to say you are going to back down?" her
mother shrieked.

"Good God! that I should make her suffer like this!" said Ransom to
himself; and to put an end to the odious scene he would have seized
Verena in his arms and broken away into the outer world, if Olive, who
at Mrs. Tarrant's last loud challenge had sprung to her feet, had not at
the same time thrown herself between them with a force which made the
girl relinquish her grasp of Ransom's hand. To his astonishment, the
eyes that looked at him out of her scared, haggard face were, like
Verena's, eyes of tremendous entreaty. There was a moment during which
she would have been ready to go down on her knees to him, in order that
the lecture should go on.

"If you don't agree with her, take her up on the platform, and have it
out there; the public would like that, first-rate!" Mr. Filer said to
Ransom, as if he thought this suggestion practical.

"She had prepared a lovely address!" Selah remarked mournfully, as if to
the company in general.

No one appeared to heed the observation, but his wife broke out again.
"Verena Tarrant, I should like to slap you! Do you call such a man as
that a gentleman? I don't know where your father's spirit is, to let him
stay!"

Olive, meanwhile, was literally praying to her kinsman. "Let her appear
this once, just this once: not to ruin, not to shame! Haven't you any
pity; do you want me to be hooted? It's only for an hour. Haven't you
any soul?"

Her face and voice were terrible to Ransom; she had flung herself upon
Verena and was holding her close, and he could see that her friend's
suffering was faint in comparison to her own. "Why for an hour, when
it's all false and damnable? An hour is as bad as ten years! She's mine
or she isn't, and if she's mine, she's all mine!"

"Yours! Yours! Verena, think, think what you're doing!" Olive moaned,
bending over her.

Mr. Filer was now pouring forth his nature in objurgations and oaths,
and brandishing before the culprits--Verena and Ransom--the extreme
penalty of the law. Mrs. Tarrant had burst into violent hysterics, while
Selah revolved vaguely about the room and declared that it seeme