"If she did," said John Merton, very sternly, taking a step in advance, and bringing down his hand upon the table at which the Colonel was sitting, "I don't suppose her death would lie heavily upon your soul; but I would make you answer for it, so help me God!"
"By George, do you threaten me, sir?" said the Colonel, springing to his feet. The next instant he sank easily back into his chair, saying, "Pshaw! the thing is too preposterous; you don't imagine I could fight you?"
"I had no such idea, Colonel Orpington; but what I threatened just now I would carry out. If this girl becomes your victim, and if that result which I have just foreshadowed, and which seems to me inevitable, should ensue, I will take care that your name is dragged before the public as the girl's seducer and the cause of her ruin. These are not very moral times, but the gay Lothario stamp of man is rather laughed at nowadays, especially when he has not the excuse of youth for his folly; and when mixed up with his folly there are such awkward episodes as desertion and suicide, people no longer laugh at him, they cut him. The newspapers write articles about him; and his friends, who are doing the same thing themselves, but do not labour under the disadvantage of being found out, shake their heads and are compelled to give him up. From all I have heard of you, Colonel Orpington, you are far too fond of society and too great a favourite in it to risk being treated in such a manner for such a temporary amusement."
"If you have heard anything of me, sir," said the Colonel, rising in a rage, "you may have heard that I never brook confounded impertinence, and I'm d--d if I stand it any longer! I will trouble you to leave this house at once, and never let me set eyes on you again," he added, ringing the bell.
"I trust I shall never have occasion to come across you, Colonel Orpington," said John Merton firmly; "whether I do or not entirely rests upon yourself. Depend upon it, that I shall hold to everything I have said, and that I shall not shrink from carrying out what I have fully made up my mind to do on account of any menaces."
He bowed slightly to the Colonel, turned round, and slowly walked from the room.
Left to himself, the Colonel took to pacing up and down the library with great strides. He was evidently labouring under great annoyance; he bit his lips and tossed his head in the air, and muttered to himself as he walked up and down.
"That fellow struck the right note at last," he said. "Insolent brute! All that palaver about honest man's fireside, and children calling her mother, and that kind of thing, one has heard a thousand times; but if all happened as he prophesied--and I confess it is the usual ending to such things--and he made a row as he threatened, it would be deuced unpleasant. He is right about the Lothario business being over; and more than right about people grinning at you when you are mixed up in such matters at fifty years of age. And if it were to come to what he suggested, death and that kind of thing, there would probably be a great row. Those infernal newspaper paragraphs about the heartless seducer--they don't like those things at the Court or the Horse Guards; and then one would have to run the gauntlet of the clubs and that kind of thing. By Jove, it's worth considering whether the game is worth the candle, after all!"
At that moment Miss Orpington entered.
"Who was that person, papa?" said she. "I thought I heard you speak quite angrily to him."