"Has it taken you all these years to find out that it's nonsense?" she demanded, her eyes flashing. "It's no good arguing, father. I don't like you. There is a very good reason why I should despise you. We won't go into it. After this meeting, we go our separate ways again. This, it seems, was unavoidable. I shan't ask anything of you, and I advise you to ask nothing of me."
"My God, that a child should utter such words to a father!" he groaned.
"A father!" she cried so scornfully that he must have shrivelled had he been any one else but Colonel Castleton of the Indian Corps. As it was, he had the grace to turn a very bright red. "A noble father you have been! And what a splendid, self-sacrificing husband you were. No! I can't forget how my mother lived and died. You call it nonsense. Well, I call it something else. You took a most effective way to punish my poor mother for having the temerity to marry an English gentleman. Thank God, I have my mother to look back to for my own ideas of gentility."
"You never understood the way things went wrong between your mother and me," he said harshly. "She wasn't all you may be pleased to think she was. She—"
"How dare you insinuate—"
"She chucked me. That's the sum and sub—"
"Oh, I was old enough to know that she left you—chucked you, if you will—and to know why she did it. I—I suppose you are looked upon by—these people here—Leslie Wrandall and every one else, as a fine English gentleman, a cousin of the great Lord Murgatroyd. Are you?"
"Confound you, Hetty, how dare you use such a tone in speaking to me?" he exclaimed.
"They THINK you are a gentleman, do they?"
"THINK? Why, dammit, I am a gentleman. The only ungentlemanly thing I ever did in my life was to—" He checked the angry words, biting his lips to keep them down.