“Look here, my lady,” he said, “you just leave things alone that don't belong to you. Never you mind what reasons I 've got for disliking young Traill—it's enough if I say that he's not to come here—and Miss Isabel shall hear that from my own lips.”
In all her long experience of him she had never known him so angry as he was now, and she had never before been so afraid of him; but at the mention of Isabel, she called all her courage to her aid and drew herself up.
“You must not do that,” she said. “You cannot insult Isabel here, when she has been such a friend of ours, and been so good—so good. I love her, and the man she is going to marry is my friend.”
“Oh!” he said, speaking very low and coming very close to her. “This is defiance, is it? You will do this and that, will you? I tell you that he shall not come here.”
“And I say that he shall,” she answered in a whisper.
Then, with the accumulated irritation of the day upon him, he suddenly came to her and, muttering between his teeth, “We 'll see about the master here,” struck her so that he cut his hand on her brooch, and she fell back against the wall, and stayed there with her hands spread out against it, staring at him....
There was a long silence, with no sound save the clock and the distant wind. He had never, in their long married life, struck her before. They both knew, as they stood there staring at one another, that a period had suddenly been placed, like an iron wall, in their lives. Their relations could never be the same again. They might be better, they might be worse—they could never be the same.
But with him there was a great overwhelming horror of what he had done. Her white face, her large, shining eyes, the way that her hands lay against the wall, and the way that her dress fell about her feet, because her knees were bending under her—drove this home to him. He was appalled; suddenly that man in him that had been dead for twenty years was brought to life by that blow.
“My dear—my dear—don't look at me like that—I did not mean anything—I am not angry—I am terribly ashamed.... Please—”
His voice was a trembling whisper. He put out his hand towards her. She took his hand, and came away from the wall, still looking at him fixedly.