You can tell them this if you will, Cecil,--my uncle Lord Davenant, your mother, and whoever had a say in this miserable affair.

Tell them from me that I know the truth and that they are a pack of cowardly, unnatural old women.

Tell them that so long as I live It will never willingly speak to one of them again.
"I was afraid you'd take it like that," he remarked dolefully.
"Take it like that!" she repeated in fierce scorn.

"How else could a woman hear such news?
How else do you suppose she could feel to be told that she had been hoodwinked, and kept from her duty and a man's heart very likely broken, to save the respectability of a worn-out old family.
Oh, how could they have dared to do it?
How could they have dared to do it ?" "It was a beastly mistake," he admitted.
A whirlwind of scorn seemed to sweep over her.

She could keep still no longer.