"What you laughing at?" he muttered, taking the pipe from his mouth.
"You!" Priscilla was only seven then, but large and strong.
"Me? How dare you!"
"You are so funny. If I screw my eyes tight I see two of you."
Then Nathaniel struck her. Not brutally, not maliciously; he wanted desperately to set himself right by—old-time and honoured methods—force of authority!
Priscilla sprang from her chair, all the laughter and joyousness gone from her face. She went close to her father, and leaning toward him as though to confide the warning to him more directly, said slowly:
"Don't you do that or Cilla will hate you!"
It was as if she meant to impress upon him that past a certain limit he could not go.
Nathaniel rose in mighty wrath at this, and, white-faced and outraged, darted toward the rebel, but she escaped him and put the width of the room and the square deal table between them. Then began the chase that suddenly sank into a degrading and undignified proceeding. Around and around the two went, and presently the child began to laugh again as the element of sport entered in.
So Theodora came upon them, and her deeper understanding of her husband's face frightened and spurred her to action. In that moment, while she feared, she loved, as she had never loved before, her small daughter. If the child was a conscience to her stern father, she was a materialization of all the suppressed defiance of the mother, and, ignoring consequences, she ran to Priscilla, gathered her in her arms, and over the little, hot, panting body, confronted the blazing eyes of her husband.