"As for this designing woman, I tell you, she is not for you,—not, that is, in any honourable sense. If you choose to make a fool of her, that's your affair. I suppose you'll sow the usual crop of wild oats before you've done. But as to marrying her—"
"By God, sir!" broke in Piers passionately. "Do you imagine that I propose to do anything else?"
The words came from him like a cry wrung from a man in torture, and as he uttered them the last of his self-control slipped from his grasp. With a face gone suddenly devilish, he strode round the table and stood before his grandfather, furiously threatening.
"I have warned you!" he said, and his voice was low, sunk almost to a whisper. "You can say what you like of me. I'm used to it. But—if you speak evil of her—I'll treat you as I would any other blackguard who dared to insult her. And now that we are on the subject, I will tell you this. If I do not marry this woman whom I love—I swear that I will never marry at all! That is my final word!"
He hurled the last sentence in Sir Beverley's face, and with it he would have swung round upon his heel; but something in that face detained him.
Sir Beverley's eyes were shining with an icy, intolerable sparkle. His thin lips were drawn in the dreadful semblance of a smile. He was half-a-head taller than Piers, and he seemed to tower above him in that moment of conflict.
"Wait a minute!" he said. "Wait a minute!"
His right hand was feeling along the leathern surface of the writing-table, but neither his eyes nor Piers' followed the movement. They held each other in a fixed, unalterable glare.
There followed several moments of complete and terrible silence—a silence more fraught with violence than any speech.
Then, with a slight jerk, Sir Beverley leaned towards Piers. "So," he said, "you defy me, do you?"