"They will kill me!" she cried; but Miss Haredale only wept afresh, and bemoaned all the misery, and gave Amethyst no real support at all. She was holding by another end of the tangle, and began to speak of Carrie and Charles--and what was she to do? while Lord Haredale turned and swore at her, and the flood of wrath and argument surged away from Amethyst for a moment, and then turned back to include her once more. Strained as her nerves already were, she was so frightened at Lord Haredale's violent tones and gesture, that with a sobbing cry of "Oh, father--oh, father! don't strike me!" she turned and fled, every other feeling lost in a personal terror that had never crossed her imagination before. "What a fool the girl is!" cried Lord Haredale; "as if I should hurt her. You've managed her confoundedly ill, my lady, to bring all this about." "Well, I have," said Lady Haredale. "When one is so upset and so dreadfully anxious, one is really stupid. And Amethyst has your temper, my lord. I never saw a girl in such a passion, but I'll set it right presently. As for you, Annabel, if Carrie Carisbrooke is determined to stick to Charles, why not? It's a straw to cling to." "I was a wicked woman to bring her near him," said Miss Haredale, sobbing; "her heart will be broken, and Amethyst's too." "Not a bit of it," said Lady Haredale. "Amethyst has a sharp tongue, and, like Una, she's emotional. Dear me, so we all are! I was just now, myself, and very incautious. But I won't have the poor child frightened to death, my lord, and I think you'll have to beg her pardon." She left the room, leaving the brother and sister alone, the latter still in tears, and Lord Haredale cooling down under his wife's shower of common sense. "Well, Anna," he said presently, "it isn't the first time that you have heard a man swear, at any rate. You know there's no disrespect intended." "It is a long time, Haredale, since I lived with my relations," said Miss Haredale, dryly. "Grattan doesn't swear," said Lord Haredale, with a slight accent of contempt, caused, perhaps, by the keen edge of intolerable and ill-requited obligation. "She'll be a thousand times better off if she marries him." "Oh, she will," said Miss Haredale. "If only she can so feel it!" "Well," said Lord Haredale, "her mother's clever enough; perhaps she'll bring her round." His wrath had evaporated in its own violence, and he began to think how he could pass the morning least intolerably, since the haunts of his fellows were not likely to be made pleasant to him for the present. Miss Haredale was full of remorse and misery, but Sir Richard Grattan's offer represented to her the last straw to hold by, and she had not courage enough to back up Amethyst's resistance to it.