“You might have sent them to me without coming out to Bergen,” she said with impatience. She spoke with her usual tone, a little more impertinently than usual; but her lips were very pale. “What did Billy tell you?” she added between her teeth. She felt sick with fear. “Mr. Massarene told me nothing. Beaumont, whom I saw subsequently, told me everything.” She breathed more freely. Billy might have done worse than he had done. Beaumont of course knew nothing, except the fact of this debt and its payment. She sat down in a low reclining chair and leaned back in it, and put her coat with its big gold buttons and wild-rose perfume on the cabin table. “Did you come out here only to say this?” she asked in a very bored tone; she wondered why she had so terrified and tortured herself: whatever Ronald knew he would not say to others. Her attitude, her tone, her surpassing insolence and coolness broke the bonds of his patience, the storm of his wrath and of his scorn burst; he spoke as had never thought to speak to any woman. All the pain and humiliation he had suffered through her, of which he had been able to say no word to any living soul, found outlet in a flood of furious reproach. She listened, indifferent, taking a cigarette off the cabin table and lighting it from a fusee box which she carried in the breast-pocket of her serge jacket. The whole thing was odious to her in its recollection; but it was past and Massarene was in his grave, and had taken her secrets with him except as regarded her debts. Ronald might rave as he would; he would not kill her, and he would not expose her to other people. It was a wretched scene to have to go through, but after all scenes only take it out of one. One doesn’t die of them. So she sat still, swaying gently to and fro, and smoking, while the bitter shame and suffering, which her brother expressed, rolled like a tempest over her head and left her unmoved, unrepentant. “To think that you come of my blood--that you had my name!” he said with hot tears scorching his eyes. “To think that you were once a little innocent child whom I carried about in my arms at Faldon! You are a mass of lies, a tissue of infamy; your very breath is falsehood. You have not even such common shame and honesty as we may find in the poorest women of the streets. Poor Otterbourne said once to me that your influence was a moral phylloxera. How true, good God! how true! They tear up and burn the tainted vines. We ought to slay such women as you!” She laughed a little, but her eyes flashed fire. “A moral phylloxera! I never knew poor Poodle say anything so clever. How long is this scene to last? I really see no good in it. It seems to relieve your feelings, but it offends my taste. You appear to forget that though you are my children’s guardian you are not mine.” “I am the head of your family and your trustee.”