Elizabeth slowly drew her hand from David's—and instantly he knew that she was frightened. What! Was he to lose her again? He shook with rage. When under that panic storm of words, that menace of distrust and disgrace, Elizabeth, in an agony of uncertainty, hid her face in her hands, David could have killed the robber who was trying to tear her from him. He burst into denunciation of the littleness which could regard their course in any other way than he did himself. He had no pity because his assailant was his mother. He gave no quarter because she was a woman; she was an enemy! an enemy who had stolen in out of the night to rob him of his lately won treasure. "Don't listen to her," he ended, hoarsely; "she doesn't know what she is talking about!"
"But, David, that was what I said. I said it would be bad for you; she says it will ruin you—"
"It is a lie!" he said.
It was nearly three o'clock. They were all at the breaking-point of anger and terror.
"Elizabeth," Helena Richie implored, "if you love him, are you willing to destroy him? You could not bear to have me, his mother, speak of his dishonor; how about letting the world speak of it—if you love him?"
"David," Elizabeth said again, her shaking hands on his arm; "you hear what she says? Perhaps she is right. Oh, I think she is right! What shall I do?"
The entreaty was the entreaty of a child, a frightened, bewildered child. Helena Richie caught her breath; for a single strange moment she forgot her agony of fear for her son; the woman in her was stronger than the mother in her; some obscure impulse ranged her with this girl, as if against a common enemy. "My dear, my dear!" she said, "he shall not have you. I will save you."
But Elizabeth was not listening. "David, if I should injure you"—
"You will ruin him," his mother repeated.
David gave her a deadly look. "You will kill me, Elizabeth, unless you come to me," he said, roughly. "Do you want to rob me again?—You've done it once," he reminded her; love made him brutal.