"Thought? No. I have no time for thinking. I know." The day was dawning fast, and the pale, soft light slanting into Mary's bedroom at the sides of the curtain, giving to each face a ghastly, livid look. Salis strode to the window, and snatched the curtain aside before turning to pour out upon his sister's head the hot vial of his wrath. But as he turned and faced her his anger was swept away by a great flood of pity, and he approached her gently, for he read in the handsome face before him, flushed with defiant, reckless passion, that she had reached a point in her life when a word might turn her to a future of good or one of misery and despair. She gazed at him as if he were her greatest enemy, and then at Mary, to see her hands extended, and a look of tenderness and love in her pitying eyes. But the time was unpropitious; there had been a scene with her lover an hour before, which had stirred her angry passions to their deepest depth, and then, as she encountered her brother with his stern words of reproach, it seemed to her that the time had come when she must strive for her freedom. Tom Candlish had reproached her for her cowardice, and laughed her obedience to those at home to scorn. He had brutally told her to go and trouble him no more with letter or message, for she was a poor puling thing, and she had returned heartbroken and in misery, for, defiant to all else, she was this man's slave. The encounter then had unloosed her angry passions, and flogging herself again and again with her lover's words, she turned recklessly upon those who were ready to forgive and take her to their breasts. "Leo, dear Leo, for pity's sake!" cried Mary wildly. "Come to me, sister. I cannot even crawl to you." "And you ask me, worse than worm that you are, to go down on my knees to you; and for what, pray? For the heinous sin of being true to the man I love. There, do you hear me, to the man I love?" "Leo! sister!" said Salis, trying to take her hand, but she struck his away with an angry gesture which he did not resent. "Well, what have you to say?" she cried. "Do you want to preach to me, to ask me to repent and sorrow with you? For what? Is it a crime to love?" "Leo, my child!" "Leo, my child!" she cried scornfully, as she repeated his words. "I tell you I am a child no longer, and that I will think and act for myself. Fool, idiot that I have been!" she cried, as her passion grew more wild and her voice rose. "I have submitted to you both till it has become unbearable. From this day, if I stay here, I will be my own mistress, and suffer your dictation no more. Teach and torture Mary into her grave, if you like, but I will be free." "Say nothing, Hartley," said Mary softly. "She will repent all this, dear, when she is calm. Leo, stay with me. Hartley, dear, pray say no more; she is not mistress of herself, and to-morrow, perhaps to-day, this painful scene will be forgiven and forgotten by us all."