“I might refuse to answer, madam,” replied Neva, “but you know as well as I do that I was about to start for Inverness on foot, and that I intended to go back to Hawkhurst and to my friends. Unfortunately, Mrs. Black, you are my personal guardian; but Sir John Freise and my other guardians, are desirous that I should choose another in your stead, and I shall now do so. Your character, madam, is at last revealed to me in all its moral hideousness. My recent vague suspicions of you have become certainties. Mr. Atkins was right in his distrust of you. But, madam, because my dead father loved and trusted you to the last hour of his life, because you have borne his honored name, I will spare you from blame and obloquy, and screen your ill-doings and ill-treatment of me even from my guardians. I will agree to thus screen you if you will stand aside and let me go forth now, at this moment.” “But, Neva,” said Mrs. Black, “you will lose your way on the mountains; you will make a misstep over some cliff, or into some ravine; or you will die of cold and exhaustion long before you can reach Inverness. It is twenty miles as the crow flies. It is forty, as you would have to travel. We will not send you in the yacht. Your scheme of departure is impracticable. In fact, you cannot go.” “You mean to detain me here a prisoner?” “Call yourself by what name you will,” said Craven Black, “you cannot go.” The young girl looked around her desperately, like a hunted deer. There was no pity or sympathy in those hard and greedy faces. Had she been penniless, she would have been as free as the birds of the air; but being rich, her enemies looked upon her as their rightful prey. “Are you a pack of outlaws?” demanded Neva, her young voice ringing through the room. “How dare you thus interfere with the liberty of an English woman?” “You are not an English woman, but only an English girl,” interrupted Octavia Black. “You are a minor, without right or liberty or the exercise of your own will. You are my ward, Neva, and as your guardian I command your obedience. How can you reconcile it with your conscience to rebel against your step-mother?” “You are not my step-mother,” cried Neva hotly. “When you ceased to be my father’s widow, you ceased to be my step-mother.” “I think the law takes another view of such a case,” said Mrs. Black. “But, at any rate, I am still your guardian, and as such I have a right to read all the letters you write or receive. I read your letter to Lord Towyn, and exhibited it to my husband--” “And to your husband’s cousin, and to your maid,” said Neva. “I am aware of all that. As to your right to examine my letters, I do not believe in it. Your action in opening my letter to Lord Towyn,” and Neva’s cheeks flamed, “and in reading its contents aloud to your familiars, was an act of the grossest indelicacy and want of honor and moral principle. Any person with a grain of decency in his composition will confirm what I say!”