"I wish you wouldn't tell people your title," she said. "They only laugh."
"He didn't laugh when I told him," said Bunny. "And why shouldn't I? I've a right to it."
He would not see her point she knew. But she made an attempt to explain. "He would have liked to call himself a gentleman," she said. "But--he didn't."
"That's quite different," said Bunny loftily. "He knows he isn't one."
Maud abandoned the argument then, because--though it was against her judgment--she found that she wanted to agree.
CHAPTER IV
THE ACCEPTED SUITOR
"Hark to the brute!" said Bunny.
A long, loud peal of laughter was echoing through the house. Maud shuddered at the sound. The noisy wooing of her mother's suitor made her feel physically sick. But for Bunny, she would have fled incontinently from the man's proximity. Because of Bunny, she sat at a rickety writing-table in a corner of the room and penned an urgent, almost a desperate, appeal to the bachelor uncle in the North to deliver them from the impending horror. No other consideration on earth would have forced such an appeal from her. She felt literally distraught that night. She was being dragged, a helpless prisoner, to the house of bondage.
Again came that loud, coarse laugh, and with it the opening of a door on the other side of the passage.