“It is always said to be a reason--not for defying anybody--but for standing up for what you call my own interests, papa--when they are somebody else’s interests as well. You said we might be engaged--and we were. And how can I let anyone, even you, say he is a stranger? He is my _fiancé_. He is betrothed to me. We belong to each other. Whatever anyone may say, that is the fact,” cried Bee, very rapidly, to get it all out before she was interrupted. “It is not at all a cheerful or pleasant fact--if it changes my little Bee, whom I thought I knew, to this flushed and brazen woman, fighting for her----. Go, child, and don’t make an exhibition of yourself. Your mother’s daughter! It is not credible--to assault me, your father, in my own room, for the sake of----” “Papa! don’t you remember that it is said in the Bible you are not to provoke your children to wrath? Mamma would have stood up for you, I suppose, when she was engaged to you. I may be flushed,” cried Bee, putting her hands to her blazing cheeks, “how could I help it? Forced to talk to you, to ask you--on a subject that gives you a right to speak to me, your own child, like that----” “I am glad you think I have a right to speak as the circumstances demand to my own child,” said the Colonel, cooling down; “but why you should be forced, as you say, to take up such an unbecoming and unwomanly position is beyond my guessing.” “It is because I have no longer mamma to speak for me,” Bee said. The creature was not without skill. Now she came back to the point that was not to be gainsaid. “We have had quite enough of this,” Colonel Kingsward replied. “Your mother, as you are quite aware, never set up her will against mine. She was aware, if you are not, that I knew the world better than she did, and was more competent to decide. Your mother would never have stood up to me as you have done.” “It would have been better, perhaps, sometimes, if she had,” cried Bee, carried away by the tide of her excitement. Colonel Kingsward was so astounded that he had scarcely power to be angry. He gazed at his excited child with a surprise that was beyond words. “Oh, papa, papa! Forgive me! I never meant that; it came out before I was aware.” “The thought must have been there or it could not have come out,” he said. “Oh, no; there was no thought there. It may be so with you, but not with us, papa. Words come into our mouths. We don’t think them; we don’t mean to say--they only seem to--hook on to--something that went before; and then they come out with a crash. Oh, forgive me, forgive me, papa!” “I suppose,” he said, with a half laugh, “that may be taken as a woman’s exposition of her own style of argument.” “Don’t call me a woman,” she said, with her soft small voice, aggrieved and wounded, drawing closer to him. “Oh, papa! I am only your little girl after all.” “A naughty little girl,” he said, shaking his head. “And without mamma to speak for me,” added Bee.