"I am her mother. She is not of age. I _can_ demand to see her. I can make her come home and stay with me while I see her through her 'trouble,' as pious people call it. She's got herself into trouble--just like a housemaid. I knew she would--I warned her," and her laugh was actually shrill. It was inevitable--and ghastly--that he should suddenly see Robin with her white eyelids dropped over her basket of sewing by the window in the Tower room at Darreuch. It rose as clear as a picture on a screen and he felt sick with actual terror. "I'll go to the Duchess and ask her questions until she can't face me without telling the truth. If she's nasty I'll talk to the War Work people who crowd her house. They all saw Robin and the wide-awake ones will understand when I'm maternal and tragic and insist on knowing. I'll go to Mrs. Muir and talk to her. It will be fun to see her face and the Duchess'." He had never suspected her of malice such as this. And even in the midst of his ghastly dismay he saw that it was merely the malice of an angrily spiteful selfish child of bad training and with no heart. There was nothing to appeal to--nothing to arrest and control. She might repent her insanity in a few days but for the period of her mood she would do her senseless worst. "Your daughter has not done what you profess to believe," he said. "You do not believe it. Will you tell me why you propose to do these things?" She had worked herself up to utter recklessness. "Because of _everything_," she spat forth. "Because I'm in a rage--because I'm sick of her and her duchesses. And I'm most sick of you hovering about her as if she were a princess of the blood and you were her Grand Chamberlain. Why don't you marry her yourself--baby and all! Then you'll be sure there'll be another Head of the House of Coombe!" She knew then that she had raved like a fishwife--that, even though there had before been no fishwives in Mayfair, he saw one standing shrilling before him. It was in his eyes and she knew it before she had finished speaking, for his look was maddening. It enraged her even further and she shook in the air the hand with the big purple amethyst ring, still clutching the end of the bedizened purple scarf. She was intoxicated with triumph--for she had reached him. "I will! I will!" she cried. "I will--to-morrow!" "You will not!" his voice rang out as she had never heard it before. He even took a step forward. Then came the hurried leap of feet up the narrow staircase and Owen Delamore flung the door wide, panting: "You told me to dash in," he almost shouted. "They're coming! We can rush round to the Sinclairs'. They're on the roof already!" She caught the purple scarf around her and ran towards him, for at this new excitement her frenzy reached its highest note. "I will! I will!" she called back to Coombe as she fled out of the room and she held up and waved at him again the hand with the big amethyst. "I will, to-morrow!"