“No, no, Miss Leyton,” she said, “you don’t come here to insult me, and then leave before you have heard all I have to say to you! In the first place your assurance to-day is the first I ever heard of your being engaged to marry Captain Pullen. _He_ didn’t take the trouble to make it public. He never mentioned you except to say what a cold, reserved, unpleasant nature you had, and how impossible it would be for a man with any human feeling to get on with you! That is what _he_ thought! And he said it too, when he had his arm round my waist, and his face close to mine. And now he has come to England, I suppose he is afraid to carry on with me any more, for fear that you should hear of it! But I don’t mean to let him off so easily, I can tell you! He shall answer those letters, which you _say_ he threw away in the grate, but which you are just as likely to have pilfered from his desk, before he is many days older!” “You cannot _make_ him answer them,” said Elinor, proudly, “whatever you may affirm!” “Not on paper perhaps, but by word of mouth! I will take them back to him at Aldershot, and see whether he can deny what I have told when he is face to face with me!” “Surely!--surely!--you would never proceed to so unmaidenly an extremity,” exclaimed Elinor, losing sight for a moment of her indignation in her horror at the idea. “You must not think of such a thing! You would create a scandal in the Camp! You would be despised for it ever after!” “I can take care of myself!” replied Harriet, boldly, “you need not fear for me! And if even you _do_ get your own way about this matter, you will have the satisfaction all your married life of knowing that your husband was a coward and a traitor to you, even during your engagement, and that you will never be able to trust him further than you can see him, to the end! If you can care for such a husband, take him, for I’m sure I wouldn’t. But he shall answer to me for all that!” “Oh! Miss Brandt, let me go, pray let me go!” said Elinor in a tone of such unmistakeable pain, that the other involuntarily drew back, and let her push her way past her to the door. As Miss Leyton disappeared, Harriet Brandt commenced to pace up and down the length of the drawing-room. It was not the swaying walk of disappointment and despair; it was determined and masterful, born of anger and a longing for revenge. All the Creole in her, came to the surface--like her cruel mother, she would have given over Ralph Pullen to the vivisecting laboratory, if she could. Her dark eyes rolled in her passion; her slight hands were clenched upon each other; and her crimson lips quivered with the inability to express all she felt. Bobby, glancing in upon her from the French windows which opened on the garden, crept to her side and tried to capture her clenched hands, and to keep her restless body still. But she threw him off, almost brutally. At that moment she _was_ brutal.