Lyle staggered under the insult as if she had received a blow, and pale and trembling, went into the next room to wait on the guests. She was relieved to see that Rutherford was not there; she felt she could not have faced him while those words of her father’s were ringing in her ears. There was only Mr. Houston, who greeted her with his usual gentle courtesy, and Morgan, whom she despised.
Out in the kitchen, however, her cause was being championed by Mrs. Maverick, the fire flashing from her faded eyes, as she talked in a manner very unusual for her.
“You may abuse me as much as you like, Jim Maverick,” she was saying, “I’ve had nothing but abuse from you for the past twenty years, and I don’t never expect nothing else, but if you ever lay a hand on that girl, or speak to her like that again, you’ll be sorry for it. I can make you smart for it, and you know it, and I’ll do it too.”
The boys, Joe and Jim, aged respectively twenty and eighteen, stared at their mother in astonishment, but their father, several shades paler, ordered them from the house; then advancing toward his wife, shaking his fist and cursing her, he exclaimed:
“You damned old fool! do you think you can try to scare me? you’ll find ’tain’t very healthy business for you.”
“Kill me, if you want to,” she replied doggedly, “but you’ll find it won’t make you any better off; I’ve fixed you for that.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, now thoroughly frightened.
“Mean!” said his wife, as she saw that she at last had the brute in her power, “it means that you’ve got to let that girl alone, and behave yourself to me, or you’ll wish you had, that’s all.”
Just then, Minty entered on the scene, her round eyes wide open with astonishment, and Lyle entering an instant later from the breakfast room, Maverick slunk away to his work.
Meanwhile, the other boarders were gathering in the breakfast room, Miss Gladden and Rutherford being the last to enter.