"She has been wrong in her extravagance, as I said before, but she is very young, and her childishness is no excuse for your brutality."
Rage, or the brandy, or both together, flamed up hotly in Geoffrey's face.
"I'd like to know what right you have to talk about brutality?" he sneered.
"I've the right of any man to keep another from ill-treating his daughter."
"Well, you're a nice one with your history to put on these highfaluting, righteous airs, aren't you?"
For an instant the unutterable disgust in Ordway's mind was like physical nausea. What use was it, after all, to bandy speeches, he questioned, with a mere drunken animal? His revulsion of feeling had moved him to take a step toward the door, when the sound of the words Geoffrey uttered caused him to stop abruptly and stand listening.
"Much good you'll do her when she hears about that woman you've been keeping down at Tappahannock. As if I didn't know that you'd been running back there again after that Brooke girl——"
The words were choked back in his throat, for before they had passed his lips Ordway had swung quickly round and struck him full in the mouth.
With the blow it seemed to Daniel that all the violence in his nature was loosened. A sensation that was like the joy of health, of youth, of manhood, rushed through his veins, and in the single exalted instant when he looked down on Geoffrey's prostrate figure, he felt himself to be not only triumphant, but immortal. All that his years of self-sacrifice had not done for him was accomplished by that explosive rush of energy through his arm.
There was blood on his hand and as he glanced down, he saw that Geoffrey, with a bleeding mouth, was struggling, dazed and half drunk, to his feet. Ordway looked at him and laughed—the laugh of the boastful and victorious brute. Then turning quickly, he took up his hat and went out of the house and down into the street.