“By ----!” cried Joscelyn, “I’ll teach you, madam, to defy me. Your boy, as you call him, had better never show his face again here. _Your_ boy! if you come to that, what have you got to do with one of them? They’re _my_ children, and you’re my wife, and it’s me you’ve got to look to and take your orders from, you dashed old wild-cat, you blanked old ----!” “Oh, hold your tongue, father!” Joan cried, turning her head in angry impatience. “Mother’s quite right, we’re used to all that.” What could a man so assailed do? He could not get over his astonishment. He remained finally master of the field, in so far that they left him there volleying forth those thunders which they disdained, and saw to be nothing but words. Joscelyn recognized with the strangest humiliation that they were but words, when his women, his slaves, first ventured to let him know that they saw through him, and found them all to be froth and emptiness. If somebody had discovered Jove’s thunderbolts to be but fireworks, the Father of the Gods must have fallen to the ground like an exhausted rocket. Joscelyn felt something like this. He came down whirling from his imaginary eminence, down into an abyss of emptiness and darkness, and struck blankly against a real something which resisted him, which he could move no longer. He was not without feeling, and he became suddenly dumb as they closed the door, leaving him a much discomfited hero in possession of the field. Rebellion in his house, his slaves emancipated, the boy lost, and the whole story likely to be published over the length and breadth of the county, and himself exposed to every petty gossip and critical assembly in it. This was a terrible downfall for such a man to bear. That day messengers were sent off to Tom and Will, who came, in haste, thinking it was a funeral to which they were summoned, to hear all the tale, and to give their solemn verdict against their father. _They_ were not afraid of him now; they could swear themselves almost as fiercely as he could, and he did not overawe them as he used to do. “The governor oughtn’t to have done it,” Will said to Tom. “He ought to have had more consideration,” Tom replied. “It doesn’t do to treat young fellows so; I wouldn’t have put up with it myself, and no more will Harry.” “If we’ve seen the last of him,” said the other, “we know where to lay the fault.” There could not have been a more complete family unanimity on this point at least. CHAPTER XV. NO NEWS.