He led her into the room which had been her mother's boudoir, and when he had shut the door, "Florimel," he said, "I have striven to serve you the best way I knew. Your father, when he confessed me his heir, begged me to be good to you, and I promised him. Would I have given all these months of my life to the poor labor of a groom, allowed my people to be wronged and oppressed, my grandfather to be a wanderer, and my best friend to sit with his lips of wisdom sealed, but for your sake? I can hardly say it was for my father's sake, for I should have done the same had he never said a word about you. Florimel, I loved my sister, and longed for her goodness. But she has foiled all my endeavors. She has not loved or followed the truth. She has been proud and disdainful, and careless of right. Yourself young and pure, and naturally recoiling from evil, you have yet cast from you the devotion of a noble, gifted, large-hearted and great-souled man for the miserable preference of the smallest, meanest, vilest of men. Nor that only; for with him you have sided against the woman he most bitterly wrongs, and therein you wrong the nature and the God of women. Once more I pray you to give up this man--to let your true self speak and send him away." "Sir, I go with my Lady Bellair, driven from my father's house by one who calls himself my brother. My lawyer shall make inquiries." She would have left the room, but he intercepted her. "Florimel," he said, "you are casting the pearl of your womanhood before a swine. He will trample it under his feet and turn again and rend you. He will treat you worse still than poor Lizzy, whom he troubles no more with his presence." He had again taken her arm in his great grasp. "Let me go. You are brutal. I shall scream." "You shall not go until you have heard all the truth." "What! more truth still? Your truth is anything but pleasant." "It is more unpleasant yet than you surmise. Florimel, you have driven me to it. I would have prepared you a shield against the shock which must come, but you compel me to wound you to the quick. I would have had you receive the bitter truth from lips you loved, but you drove those lips of honor from you, and now there are left to utter it only the lips you hate. Yet the truth you shall receive: it may help to save you from weakness, arrogance and falsehood. Sister, your mother was never Lady Lossie." "You lie! I know you lie! Because you wrong me, you would brand me with dishonor, to take from me as well the sympathy of the world. But I defy you."