Again no answer.
"Where is your father?"
"My father is in India. He is in Bombay," announced Nan, deliberately.
"Who has control of you in his absence?"
"No one!" declared the girl with decision.
Mrs. Newton surveyed the lank, overgrown, girlish figure with unconcealed scorn.
"Do you know," she said with bitter distinctness, "that you are the most shameless, unfeeling girl I have ever beheld? Any one else would show some remorse for what she had done, but you—young as you are, you are the hardest creature I have ever known. Hard, cruel, and cold. How can you stand there and look me in the face when you know how you have injured me? Tell me, does it not touch you at all that Ruth is hurt? Do you know or care that such a fall as she has had is enough to cripple a child for life? Many children have been hopelessly crippled through far less."
The mother's voice broke, and she set her lips to keep down a sob.
"How much is she hurt?" whispered Nan after a moment. She was trembling all over and cold and hot by turns, and she could not command her voice. It was almost more than she could do to keep from bursting into a violent fit of sobbing from her sense of injury and shame and indignation. But she simply would not permit herself to break down. No one should be allowed to think they intimidated her. But she could not hide her anxiety about Ruth.
"Is she much hurt?" she repeated.