k red flush had
mounted his forehead to the roots of his short curly hair.

"Well?" he said.

She was fighting for her presence of mind. Flashes of his temper she had
known, but she had never seen the cruel, fiendish thing--his anger. Not
his anger, but the anger of the destroyer that she beheld waking now
after its long sleep, and taking possession of him, and transforming him
before her very eyes. She had been able to cope with the new man, but she
felt numb and powerless before the resuscitated demon of the old.

"What do you expect me to say, Hugh?" she faltered, with a queer feeling
that she was not addressing him.

"Anything you like," he replied.

"Defend Cecil."

"Why should I defend him?" she said dully.

"Because you have no pride."

A few seconds elapsed before the full import and brutality of this insult
reached her intelligence, and she cried out his name in a voice shrill
with anguish. But he seemed to delight in the pain he had caused.

"You couldn't be expected, I suppose, to see that this letter is a d--d
impertinence, filled with an outrageous flippancy, a deliberate affront,
an implication that our marriage does not exist."

She sat stunned, knowing that the real pain would come later. That which
slowly awoke in her now, as he paced the room, was a high sense of
danger, and a persistent inability to regard the man who had insulted her
as her husband. He was rather an enemy to them both, and he would
overturn, if he could, the frail craft of their happiness in the storm.
She cried out to Hugh as across the waters.

"No,--I have no pride, Hugh,--it is gone. I have thought of you only. The
fear that I might separate you from your family, from your friends, and
ruin your future has killed my pride. He--Mr. Grainger meant to be kind.
He is always like that--it's his way of saying things. He wishes to show
that he is friendly to you--to me--"

"In spite of my relations," cried Chiltern, stopping in the middle of the
room. "They cease to be my relations from this day. I disown them. I say
it deliberately. So long as I live, not one of them shall come into this
house. All my life they have begged me to settle down, to come up here
and live the life my father did. Very well, now I've done it. And I wrote
to them and told them that I intended to live henceforth like a gentleman
and a decent citizen--more than some of them do. No, I wash my hands of
them. If they were to crawl up here from the gate