"Leave the room!" gasped poor Doris, sitting up and waving her hand frantically towards the door. Whatever her father had done, she could not listen to such abuse of him.
"Leave the room, indeed!" cried Mrs. Cameron, sitting down on a bedroom chair, which trembled beneath her weight--she weighed at least twelve stone, being stout and tall--"I shall leave it when I choose, and when I've said what I have to say, and not before! And it doesn't become you, Doris," she cried--"it doesn't become you to speak saucily to me. You're as bad as John Anderson, no doubt. Like father, like daughter! You're all tarred with the same stick. If you didn't actually take my boy's money yourself, perhaps you used some of it; or, if you didn't, no doubt it was your extravagance and your mother's that made Anderson want money so badly that he took what was not his own. However," she went on inconsequently, "you are as bad as he if you defend him, and take sides against my poor boy, who never did anything to harm you in his life----"
"Oh, I don't!" interrupted Doris, distressed beyond measure at the idea of such a thing. "If you only knew how I esteem Bernard, and I----" She broke off with a saving instinct which told her that not by pleading her love for Bernard would she soften his mother's heart.
"Esteem him, and yet take the part of the villain who has robbed him of everything?" cried the other indignantly.
"You forget"--almost soundlessly murmured Doris, her white lips only just parting for the words to escape--"you forget, the wrong-doer is my father. Yes, he has done wrong--I acknowledge it," she cried pathetically. "But still he is my father!" And the tears fell down her cheeks.
It was a sight to melt a heart of stone; but Mrs. Cameron was not looking. Though her eyes were fixed upon Doris, and her ears heard the faintly uttered words, she perceived nothing but her boy's wrongs and her own, the vanished £25,000, the stopping of Bernard's education at Oxford, the failure of her own tiny income to provide for their daily bread and the commonest clothes, the sinking of her son into a poor, subordinate sphere at the very commencement of his life, the slipping of herself into squalid, poverty-stricken surroundings, and a narrow, meagre old age. Another picture, too, presented itself the next moment, and that was the mental vision of Mr. and Mrs. Anderson enjoying themselves abroad, in the lap of luxury, eating and drinking at the best hotels, arrayed in handsome clothing, and laughing, yes, actually laughing together about the way in which they had lightened the Camerons pockets.
That being so, it was no wonder that Mrs. Cameron's next words were even harsher than those which had preceded them.
"Yes, you've a scoundrel for a father! You must never forget that!" she cried. "Never, never, for one moment! Wherever you are, whatever you may be doing, you must never forget that. You'll have to take a back seat in life, I can tell you. Not yours will be the lot of other girls. With a father who is a felon in the eyes of the law you can never marry into a respectable family without bringing into it such a load of disgrace as will do it a cruel wrong."
She fixed her eyes sharply on the girl's pale miserable face as she spoke, with more than a suspicion of a love affair between her and Bernard, which she determined to quash, cost what it might to Doris.
"If you marry," she continued harshly, "you will take your husband a dowry of disgrace--that, and nothing else!" She laughed harshly. "Why," she ejaculated the next minute, "why, the girl's not listening!" for she perceived Doris springing from her bed and beginning, in trembling haste, to dress herself.