She saw his face suddenly turn pale, and his lips set. The hand which had been lying on the table, trifling with a paper-knife, closed upon that knife quickly and firmly: he raised his eyes to his sister’s face, and said coldly: ‘Miss Ford–how is she?’ ‘Miss Ford!’ ejaculated the young girl, horror-struck. ‘Jerome! what has happened? You speak as if she was nothing to you.’ ‘Nor is she anything to me now,’ he answered, with that cold and pitiless cruelty, unbending and unremorseful, which so often appears in weak natures when they are driven to choose between themselves and another–when the moment comes in which egoistic or altruistic feelings can no longer be evenly balanced–in which one set must prevail over the other. ‘Sara–nothing to you! I–I do not understand,’ she stammered, with a sickening sensation of fear and bewilderment. ‘I will explain,’ he said, with the same cold glitter in his eyes, his lips drawn to the same thin line–a look she had never seen him wear before, and which sent her heart leaping to her throat. ‘For heaven’s sake, Jerome, do not look at me in that manner!’ she cried. ‘It is just–just as papa used to look when he thought some one wanted punishing.’ ‘Do not interrupt with such vague, foolish nonsense,’ he replied impatiently. ‘I am going to write to Miss Ford to-night, to set her free from her engagement to me. And I–wish to be free from her. I am going to marry some one else.’ Avice had pushed back her chair, and sat looking wildly at him; her hands clenched tightly; her breath coming quickly, but unable to speak a word. ‘It is as well you should understand this,’ he said, again beginning to balance the paper-knife. ‘To-night you will want to rest, I suppose, but afterwards you will have to meet the lady I speak of; and it is to be hoped you will conduct yourself with more composure, more self-respect, in fact, than you display at present.’ Then Avice found words. ‘Do you imagine that I will be false just because it pleases you to be so!’ she exclaimed. ‘If you choose to behave like a coward and a liar–yes, a coward and a liar,’ she repeated, looking full into his eyes with an unblenching scorn that scorched him, ‘and that to the noblest woman that ever lived, _I_ am neither a coward nor a liar. I will have nothing to do with this girl you are going to marry. You have brought me home, and you can make me miserable, I suppose. And you can make me see her, I dare say; but you can never make me like her, or behave as if I liked her, or as if I wished her to be my sister. And I never will. You may take my word for it. I stand by Sara Ford to the last, if I had to die for it.’ She spoke with vehement passion, and looked transformed. She spoke too like a woman, not like a child any more. And yet she was but a child, and a helpless one. He answered composedly: