A defiant yell was Cara’s sole answer. “Shut up--shut up at once, you little devil! Do you hear me?” and her father reached down, and shook her roughly by the arm. Cara surveyed him with a pair of rebellious blue eyes, then drew in her breath and screamed with a deafening increase of shrill and reckless fury. Such were her efforts, that her little face was actually purple and congested, as she drummed on the marble pavement with the heels of her best shoes. “Go ’way!” she panted. “Go ’way--ugly man--I want my mummy!” “_I_ know what you want, and what you’ll get!” cried her father, beside himself with anger, and snatching her up, he proceeded to administer to the astonished Cara, a first and ruthless chastisement: carrying out the punishment with the broad palm of a powerful hand in loud and resounding smacks. The subject was so completely dazed by the experience she had almost ceased to cry, merely ejaculating: “Bad man! Bad man! Bad man!” Meanwhile Nurse Waggett stood by, the embodiment of complacent satisfaction, till, at a sign from the executioner, she took over her gasping, sobbing, bewildered charge, and carried her off to her own apartments. Subsequently the threat, “I’ll bring your _father_!” had a magical effect upon Miss Caroline Blagdon: he remained an ineffaceable impression of awe and terror, for many and many a day. The news of ‘the break-up at the Court,’ as it was called, was all over the village by eight o’clock that night; women ran into one another’s houses with ‘Have you heard?’ Men discussed the matter over their half-pints at the ‘New Plough,’ and the general verdict was, that “the poor young lady had led a worse than dog’s life, and _he_ had been rightly served.” CHAPTER XX And now to accompany the fugitive to London. At first, the mere novelty of a drive to the station that delicious June day, and the unaccustomed journey in the train filled her with a sense of overpowering freedom; but as the heavy express thundered along, her mind, as usual, began to be uneasy and undecided; her thoughts turned insistently to her deserted baby girl, and the more she reflected, the more she felt drawn to Cara--and by her very heart-strings!