Grace was pale with anger. Margaret turned upon him like a young lioness. "How can you say such unkind, such untrue things?" she exclaimed passionately. "Oh! Grace, my darling, do not heed him." "I do not heed him," said Grace, magnificently, wounded and stung beyond belief, and quivering with passion, "but I want to know why you keep us in your house, hating us so evidently--we will not stay, we will go. You offered us a home, and now you speak as though we were a burden. We will go, Margaret." "Speak for yourself, I offered you a home for the sake of one I loved. I did not know you then. When I saw what you were, I still kept that home open to you for the sake of your sister; you put yourself above her in everything, you have made her believe you her superior in all things, but she is worth a dozen of you, and so every man in his senses will think as they know you." Grace was in tears by this time, and Margaret tried to get her to go out of the room, but she was struggling forwards, she would not go till she had said something, and she meant the last word to be very cutting. "Brother," said Mrs. Dorriman, imploringly, "you are wrong; you are saying things now in the heat of passion that you will be sorry for afterwards. It is hard to be obliged to eat the bread of dependence, and to have it cast up to you." "It is her own fault," he said, angrily; "she gives herself airs and graces as though she were above the ground she treads upon. It makes me ill the way she goes on, and she must hear it!" "Spare her now." "Oh! I'll spare her, but she has to lower her head; even Drayton would have nothing to say to her, though I did my best, and praised her up to the skies when I spoke to him." "That is more than enough!" sobbed Grace, as with Margaret clinging to her she rushed to her own room, and the sisters sobbed out their misery in each other's arms. But crying would not help them; they resolved to leave the house, to go far from this, _where_ they did not exactly know; they did not know any one except their school-mistress, and having left her with flying colours it seemed terrible to them to have to go back and face the wonder and the pity they would meet with. They were both so young and so inexperienced. They sat thinking, not wholly miserable now because they were conscious of a sort of excitement and they were together. Grace at that moment could not help thinking what a small beginning generally leads to large conclusions--this beginning had been so very, very trifling. She had been walking up and down one day to obtain the amount of exercise she conceived necessary to her well-being, the day had been damp and she kept to the gravel in front of the house. Jean, who was at the open window, to use her own expression, trying to get strong, was talking in her rich guttural voice to Mrs. Dorriman, who was in the room, though out of sight, and was watching her.