This miserable state of doubt and fear was brought to a sudden close, as I vaguely expected it would, by a new move on the part of our adversaries. It was in the spring of 1774, and we had been at St. Salvat's about eighteen months, which felt much more like as many years. One evening after supper, as I sat in my room idly listening to the sound, now so terrible to me, of the sea on the rocks, I was suddenly aroused by the sound, no less frightful to my ears, of the brawling of the uncles below. I rose in alarm, for my apartments were completely isolated from the part of the house which they occupied, and for months past all the intermediate doors had been kept carefully closed by the tacit consent of both parties. The noise became greater; I could distinguish the drunken voices of Simon and Richard, and a sharp altercation between the other ones, and just as I had stepped, beyond my own door, I heard a horrid yell of curses, a scuffle, and the door opposite, which closed the main staircase, flew open, and what was my astonishment when my husband appeared, pushed forward, or rather hurled along by Hubert. The latter shouted to me to go back, and having thrust Eustace into my room, he disappeared as suddenly as he had come, slamming the doors after him. As he did so I heard the key click; he had locked us in. My husband was in a shocking condition, his clothes torn half off him, his hair in disorder, and the blood dripping from his arm. "Do not be frightened," he cried, "'tis merely a comedy of those filthy villains," and he showed me that his wound was merely a long scratch. "They want to frighten us," he added, "the drunken brutes wanted to force me through some beastly form of initiation into their gang. Faugh!" and he looked at his arm, which I was washing; "they did it with a broken bottle, the hogs! And as to Hubert, and his fine saving me from their clutches, that, I take it, was mere play-acting too, the most sickening part of the business, and meant only to give you a scare." Eustace had thrown himself gloomily into a chair, and I had never seen him before with such a look of disgust and indignation. I was by no means as certain as he that no serious mischief had been intended, or that Hubert had not saved him from real danger. But that new look in him awoke a sudden hope in me, and I determined to strike while the iron was hot. "Eustace," I said very gravely as I bound a handkerchief round his arm, "if your impression is correct, this is almost the worst of our misery. Certainly no child of mine shall ever be born into such ignominy as this. It is high time we went. Better to die like decent folk than allow ourselves to be hacked about by these drunken brutes and pushed through doors by a theatrical villain like Hubert." "You are right, Penelope," he answered, burying his face in his chair. "I have been a miserable coward." And, to my horror, I heard him sob like a child who has been struck for the first time.