"Am I to understand," brutally went on Judd, now entirely out of himself, "that you are pretending not to know that I've been shovelling out money for you for nearly five years—ever since you were in pigtails? D'ye mean to stand there, with your damned outlandish haughtiness, and tell me that you don't know that every hairpin, every pair of shoes, every frippery or furbelow that you've owned in that time, hasn't been settled for by me? That you don't know that the roof over your head and the bed you've slept in has been paid for by me? That you don't know that the clothes that you've got on your back right this minute were bought for you by me?"
It was the cruelest moment in the girl's life. Her senses were reeling. But, by an effort of pure will, of supreme concentration, she mustered her strength to withstand the shock.
"I did not know these things," she replied in a voice that sounded in her own ears like a mere distant echo. "They are true? I was not told. Until this moment I had always supposed that my education and maintenance were paid for out of funds from—" She could not mention the name of her father in the presence of this drink-inflamed brute;—"from other sources."
"Not by a damned sight," roared Judd, relentless, paying no attention to the girl's drawn features and trembling lips. "I know what you're getting at. But you're wrong. There haven't been any 'funds from other sources,' as you call it, disbursed for you for nearly five years. And that's easy to explain, too. I wouldn't have any 'funds from other sources' dribbling along to an establishment I was maintaining. That's why I chucked what you call the 'funds from other sources' back into the sender's teeth."
Louise, under the impact of that final cowardly blow, might have fallen prone had not her mother, eyes alight with mingled rage and compassion, swept into the room at that instant and gently pushed her daughter into a chair just as Louise felt that her knees were giving way beneath her. Mrs. Treharne, standing stunned in the hall upon coming in, had heard Judd's last few sentences; and she judged from them what he had been saying before her return.
Judd's jaw fell when he saw Mrs. Treharne, for the moment imperious in her anger and her solicitude for her daughter, sweep into the room in her trailing furs. But, after an instant, he brought his twisted teeth together with a snap and gazed at her with drunken dauntlessness. It was one of Judd's hours when he was too far gone to think of surrendering even to her.
"What have you done, you unspeakable brute?" Mrs. Treharne asked him, her voice trembling, as she stood facing him, one hand on Louise's shoulder.
Louise looked up at her mother.
"He has been telling me, mother, what I now believe to be the truth," she said; "that I am indebted to him for my schooling, my maintenance, my—" She could not go on.
Mrs. Treharne's eyes blazed.