She would have continued her cruel speech but that Mrs. Bethune, who has risen, breaks into it. She comes forward in a wild, tempestuous fashion, her eyes afire, her nostrils dilated! Her beautiful red hair seems alight as she descends upon Lady Rylton. "And that marriage!" says she, in a suffocating tone. "Who made it? _Who?"_ She looks like a fury. There is hatred, an almost murderous hatred, in the glance she casts at the little, languid, pretty woman before her, who looks back at her with uplifted shoulders, and an all-round air of surprise and disapprobation. _"You_ to taunt me!" says she, in a low, condensed tone. _"You_, who hurried, who _forced_ me into a marriage with a man I detested! You, who gave me to understand, when I resisted, that I had no place on this big earth except a pauper's place--a place in a workhouse!" She stands tall, grave, magnificent, in her fury before Lady Rylton, who, in spite of the courage born of want of feeling, now shrinks from her as if affrighted. "If you persist in going on like this," says she, pressing her smelling-bottle to her nose, "I must ask you to go away--to go at once. I hate scenes. You _must_ go!" "I went away once," says Mrs. Bethune, standing pale and cold before her, "at your command--I went to the home of the man you selected for me. What devil's life I led with him you may guess at. _You_ knew him, I did not. I was seventeen then." She pauses; the breath she draws seems to rive her body in twain. "I came back----" she says presently. "A widow?" "A widow--_thank God!"_ A silence follows; something of tragedy seems to have fallen into the air--with that young lovely creature standing there, upright, passionate, her arms clasped behind her head, as the heroine of it. The sunlight from the dying day lights up the red, rich beauty of her hair, the deadly pallor of her skin. Through it all the sound of the tennis-balls from below, as they hurry to and fro through the hair, can be heard. Perhaps it reaches her. She flings herself suddenly into a chair, and bursts out laughing. "Let us come back to common-sense," cries she. "What were we talking of? The marriage of Maurice to this little plebeian--this little female Croesus. Well, what of the argument--what?" Her manner is a little excited. "I, for one, object to the marriage," says Margaret distinctly. "The child is too young and too rich! She should be given a chance; she should not be coerced and drawn into a mesh, as it were, without her knowledge." "A mesh? Do you call a marriage with my son a mesh?" asks Lady Rylton angrily. "He of one of the oldest families in England, and she a nobody!" "There is no such thing as a nobody," says Miss Knollys calmly. "This girl has intellect, mind, a _soul!_ She has even money! She _must_ be considered." "She has no birth!" says Lady Rylton. "If you are going in for Socialistic principles, Margaret, pray do not expect _me_ to follow you. I despise folly of that sort."