His manner was almost menacing. She stood facing with an awful sense of impotence growing at her heart. To summon Jake herself was a proceeding that she could not for a moment contemplate, but the bare thought of Uncle Edward's alternative pierced like a poisoned knife. She felt again that dreadful trapped feeling of former days. The liberty she had enjoyed of late made it all the more terrible.
"I can't decide anything just now," she said at last, and she knew that her voice trembled painfully. "Please--please let us wait a little! There is really no need to send for Jake. Lord Saltash has gone, and he will not come back."
"Don't tell me!" said Uncle Edward truculently. "Even if he doesn't, how am I to be sure that you won't take it into your head to go to him? No, my niece, I've heard too much. Why, he'd have had his arm round you in another second. I know--I saw. If I'd waited another three seconds, he'd have been kissing you. And not for the first time, I'll be bound."
The hot colour rushed to Maud's face; she turned sharply aside.
"Ha! That touches you, does it?" snarled Uncle Edward, with ferocious triumph. "I guessed as much. Now which is it to be? Are you going to write that letter?"
It was hopeless to carry the discussion further. A burning wave of anger went through her, anger that buoyed her up above despair, stimulating her to a fierce rebellion. She drew herself to her full height and faced him with supreme defiance.
"I will not write that letter!" she said. "I will not be forced into a false position. If you are tired of me, I will go. I will not stay--in any case--to be insulted!"
And with that boldly, with the carriage of an outraged princess, she swept by him and out of the room, leaving him staring after her in a fury too great to express itself before the closing of the door.
Up to her room she went, outwardly calm, inwardly raging. All the old hot rebellion against destiny had awaked within her. It had died down of late, soothed into quiescence by the peaceful solitude in which she had been living. But now it had sprung afresh to quivering life. Her freedom from bondage had given her new strength. She would not be bound again hand and foot, and thrust back into the old bitter slavery. It was too much, too much. She had her life to live. It was hers, not Jake's. She had a right to do with it as she would.
With hands that trembled she began to pack. Uncle Edward had made it impossible for her to stay. If he had not set her feet upon the downward path, he had sped her upon it with an impetus that drove her irresistibly. She worked in a fever, not pausing for thought, conscious but of the one urgent desire to be gone, to escape--she had scarcely begun to think whither.