"I'll disown you. You shall never cross the threshold of this house again." "I must put up even with that," said Edward sadly. "Thank God I have another son who would never disgrace his father and his father's name thus." "I know that I have been a disappointment to you, sir; but this is not the moment to make excuses for my carelessness in the past nor to try your patience with promises of reform in the future. I firmly believe that marriage with Elizabeth Taylor will give me that very stability and perseverance in which I have hitherto shown myself so lacking. If you had evinced less anger at my decision, I should have enlarged upon this benefit to my character; but in your present mood I am conscious that anything I say will only serve to enrage you against me more than ever. Luckily I am not your heir, and my brother, as you justly observe, will know better than I how to uphold the honor of your house--since you have disowned me, I hesitate to say _our_ house. Believe me, my dear, dear father, when I say that only the assurance of my whole life's happiness depending upon my marriage with Elizabeth keeps me from obeying your wishes. There is nothing to add except my deep regret for the secrecy I have maintained throughout. I can assure you that in acting in what may seem to you an underhand manner I was endeavoring to spare you pain, so that when the secret had to come out, which would have been to-morrow, for it is to-morrow that we are to be married, you would have been spared the annoyance of contesting a situation which was a _fait accompli_." "Damn it, don't talk French, and get out of my sight," Sir Richard shouted, louder than he had shouted yet, for his son's long speech had given his rage time to seethe in his breast, and it now burst forth with double volume. Edward bowed his head and rising from his chair went gloomily from the room. He found his mother standing in the corridor outside, and at a signal he followed her upstairs to her boudoir. Edward contrasted his mother's calm with his father's fury, and yet when she sat upright on a wide stool, composing her full skirts of amber sarsanet with hands that seemed incredibly small against the vast pendulous sleeves from which they emerged, Edward was more uneasy in presence of that calm than when he was being buffeted by his father's storms. There was an ivory polish, an ivory hardness, an ivory resilience about his mother that made his heart beat with a dread of this delicate creature who within his earliest memories had always come to the help of his ineffectiveness, but who now sat regarding him from eyes that seemed as hard as agates.