CHAPTER III.
Meanwhile Stephen Lawler had returned to the Grange, happy in the favor pretty Miss Lane had accorded him at the expense of Harry, whom he hated with a hatred which, if unreasonable, was not without excuse. He joined his cousins in the billiard-room, where a hot quarrel between George and Harry was only just kept from blazing forth afresh by the presence of their father, the only power on earth which could keep in check the ungovernable passions of his unruly brood. Stephen glanced from one to the other of the two angry, flushed faces, and rolled the spot-ball along the table in an idle manner, through which the least glimpse of the conqueror showed. George laughed unpleasantly.
“Stephen looks happy.”
“He’s the fox who carried off the lamb while the lion and tiger were fighting about it,” said Wilfred, the second son, quoting from Æsop’s fables rather at random.
“Was she kind, Stephen?” asked George, mockingly.
“Very kind—much kinder than she was to you.”
“That goes without saying, my dear fellow,” answered George, with a cruel patronage in his tone which made the cripple wince.
“All women don’t worship brutes! I wouldn’t enter the lists with you for your Molly and Sukey; but ladies are different.”
“Different from what? From Molly and Sukey, or from Miss Lane, the governess?”
“Ah, you can look down upon ‘Miss Lane, the governess,’ since she calls you a brute!”