"No, you do not," interrupts she; "you do it because I wished it. For the future understand that, though you are my guardian, I will not be treated as though I were a wayward child."
"Well, you have a wicked temper!" says Guy, who is very pale, drawing his breath quickly. He smiles as he says it, but it is a smile more likely to incense than to soothe.
"I have not," retorts Lilian, passionately. "But that you goaded me I should never have given way to anger. It is you who have the wicked temper. I dislike you! I hate you! I wish I had never entered your house! And"—superbly, drawing herself up to her full height, which does not take her far—"I shall now leave it! And I shall never come back to it again!"
This fearful threat she hurls at his head with much unction. Not that she means it, but it is as well to be forcible on such occasions. The less you mean a thing, the more eloquent and vehement you should grow; the more you mean it, the less vehemence the better, because then it is energy thrown away: the fact accomplished later on will be crushing enough in itself. This is a rule that should be strictly observed.
Guy, whose head is held considerably higher than its wont, looks calmly out of the window, and disdains to take notice of this outburst.
His silence irritates Miss Chesney, who has still sufficient rage concealed within her to carry her victoriously through two quarrels. She is therefore about to let the vials of her wrath once more loose upon her unhappy guardian, when the door opens, and Florence, calm and stately, sweeps slowly in.
"Aunt Anne not here?" she says; and then she glances at Guy, who is still holding in his hands some of the fragments of the broken cup, and who is looking distinctly guilty, and then suspiciously at Lilian, whose soft face is crimson, and whose blue eyes are very much darker than usual.
There is a second's pause, and then Lilian, walking across the room, goes out, and bangs the door, with much unnecessary violence, behind her.
"Dear me!" exclaims Florence, affectedly, when she has recovered from the shock her delicate nerves have sustained through the abrupt closing of the door. "How vehement dear Lilian is! There is nothing so ruinous to one's manners as being brought up without the companionship of well-bred women. The loss of it makes a girl so—so—hoydenish, and——"
"I don't think Lilian hoydenish," interrupts Guy, who is in the humor to quarrel with his shadow,—especially, strange as it seems, with any one who may chance to speak ill of the small shrew who has just flown like a whirlwind from the room.