"Do not interrupt me!--hear me out!" said the young girl. "You liked Hector Coles for a corresponding reason--because he pretended to fall into all your notions, and complimented you on your 'piety' and 'Christian dignity,' when he was all the while laughing at you behind your back. You would have been pleased to see me discard the man I loved, and marry the man I could never love while I lived,--because your own likes and dislikes were in the way, and because you believed that in the position of mother-in-law you could manage the one and could _not_ manage the other." "Well, what else, to your mother, Miss Impertinence!" broke in the lady who had been so voluble. "Oh, a great deal more!" answered Margaret, with a manner not very different from a sneer. "To-day, since you have known that for one spot on a character otherwise so noble, I have broken off all relations with Carlton Brand, you have done nothing but sit here and preach me Christian resignation in words that your own heart was as steadily denying. When a true mother would have tried to console, you have tortured. And you have ended all by alleging that Carlton Brand and his father have acquired their money dishonorably, because they have both been lawyers,--and that such money must be accursed in the hands of any one who holds it." "I have said so, and I have a right to say so!" echoed the mother. "You may let loose your ribald tongue against the author of your being, ungrateful girl; but the truth is from heaven, and must be told--wealth obtained in any manner by day, upon which a blessing cannot be asked at night, is itself accursed, and curses every one who partakes in the use of it." "And every dollar that has been dishonestly obtained, then, should at once be restored to the rightful owner, I suppose--in order to escape the curse?" suggested Margaret. "Every dollar, and at once; for, as the Bible says, the spoiler cometh as a thief in the night, and no one can say how soon the judgment may fall!" answered the mother, triumphantly and in full confidence that she had at last silenced her refractory child by a strictly orthodox quotation. "How much are we worth, mother?" was the singular question which followed this supposed annihilation of all argument. "Why, you know as well as I do that we have eighty thousand in stocks and in bank; and this property and that at Pottsville is believed to be worth twenty or thirty thousand more. We are worth, as you call it, more than a hundred thousand, and the whole of it will be yours some day--not very long first, when I have gone, as I hope and trust I may say, to my reward. You are rich, my child, and I am glad to see that you think of these things at last, as you may be kept from throwing yourself away _again_."