"You here," she said, coolly; "I didn't know it. I wanted Victor. I thought I heard his voice. And how is the heir of Catheron Royals?"
She bent, with her usual slight, chill smile over the crib of that young gentleman, and regarded him in his sleep. The nurse, listening in the dusk, she did not perceive.
"By the bye, I wonder if he is the heir of Catheron Royals though? I am reading up the Scottish Law of Marriage, and really I have my doubts. If you are Juan's wife, you can't be Sir Victor's, consequently the legitimacy of his son may yet be—"
She never finished the sentence. It was the last drop in the brimming cup—the straw that broke the camel's back—the one insult of all others not to be borne. With eyes afire in the dusk, Sir Victor's wife confronted her.
"You have uttered your last affront, Inez Catheron," she exclaimed. "You will never utter another beneath this roof. To-morrow you leave it! I am Sir Victor Catheron's wife, the mistress of Catheron Royals, and this is the last night it shall ever shelter you. Go!" She threw open the nursery door. "When my husband returns either you or I leave this house forever!"
The nurse was absolutely forgotten. For a second even Inez Catheron quailed before the storm she had raised; then black eyes met blue, with defiant scorn.
"Not all the soap-boiler's daughters in London or England shall send me from Catheron Royals! Not all the Miss Dobbs that ever bore that distinguished appellation shall drive me forth. You may go to-morrow if you will. I shall not."
She swept from the room, with eyes that blazed, and voice that rang. And Jane Pool, the nurse, thinking she had heard a little too much, softly opened an opposite door and stole out.
"Good Lor'!" she thought, "here be a pretty flare up! Ain't Miss Inez just got a temper though. I wouldn't stand in my lady's shoes, and her a-hating me so; no, not for all her money. I'll go down and get my supper, and call for Master Baby by and by."
Mrs. Pool descended to the servants' hall, to narrate, of course in confidence, to her most particular friends, the scene she had just overheard. There was Welsh rabbits for supper—nurse was particularly fond of Welsh rabbits—and in discussing it and Miss Inez's awful temper half an hour slipped away. Then she arose again to see after her charge.