ifeless tone.

"But you will? You cannot let it pass?"

"No, Mrs. Forrester. I will not let it pass."

"You will insist that he shall make a full apology to Mercedes?"

"Is he to apologise to her for hating her?" Karen at this asked
suddenly.

"For hating her? What do you mean?" Mrs. Forrester was taken aback.

"If he is to apologise," said Karen, in a still colder, still more
lifeless voice, "it must be for something that can be changed. How can
he apologise to her for hating her if he continues to hate her?"

"He can apologise for having spoken insultingly to her."

"He has not done that. It was Tante who overheard what she was not
intended to hear. And it was Tante who spoke with violence."

"It amazes me to hear you put it on her shoulders, Karen. He can
apologise, then, for what he has said to me," said Mrs. Forrester with
indignation. "You will not deny that what he said of her to me was
insulting."

"He is to tell her that he has said those words and then apologise, Mrs.
Forrester? Oh, no; you do not think what you say."

"Really, my dear Karen, you have a most singular fashion of speaking to
a person three times your age!" Mrs. Forrester exclaimed, the more
incensed for the confusion of thought into which the girl's persistence
threw her. "The long and short of it is that he must make it possible
for Mercedes to meet him, with decency, in the future."

"But I do not know how that can be," said Karen, rising as Mrs.
Forrester rose; "I do not know how Tante, now, can see him. If he thinks
these things and does not say them, there may be pretence; but if he
says them, to Tante's friends, how can there be pretence?"

There was no appeal in her voice. She put the facts, so evident to
herself, before her visitor and asked her to look at them. Mrs.
Forrester was suddenly aware that her advice might have been somewhat
hasty. She also felt suddenly as though, on a reconnoitring march down a
rough but open path, she found herself merging in the gloomy mysteries
of a forest. There were hidden things in Karen's voice.

"Well, well," she said, taking the girl's hand and casting about in her
mind for a retreat; "that's to see it as hopeless, isn't it, and we
don't want to do that, do we? We want to bring Gregory to reason, and
you are the person best fitted to do that. We want to clear up these
dreadful ideas he has got into his head, heaven knows how. And no one
but you can do it. No one in the world, my dear