Miss Madigan's voice rebelled. She could read aloud adverse opinions upon her common sense, her judgment, or her pride, but to impugn her penmanship was to commit the unforgivable.
"I think Nora is distinctly insulting," she declared.
"No!" Madigan laughed wrathfully. "Do you, now? Why, what has she said? Only that you're a beggar, and I'm a coward as well as a beggar, because I don't dare to beg in my own name."
"Does she say that?" exclaimed the literal Miss Madigan, shocked. "Where?" Her eyes sought the letter again.
"'Where'! Thousand devils—'where'!" Madigan tore it from her and threw it to the floor, stamping upon it in a frenzy.
Sighing, Miss Madigan leaned her head on her hand. It was hard enough to find one's most hopeful appeal wasted, without Francis's flying into such a rage.
A silence followed.
"Look here, Anne,"—Madigan's voice was manifestly struggling to be calm,—"you must quit this infernal letter-writing. How could you write to Miles Madigan for charity, knowing that he cheated me out of my share of the Tomboy? Half the mine was mine. You know that, and yet you hurt my—"
"I fail to see," responded Miss Madigan, with dignity, "why I should not write to my own relatives; why I should not try, for my nieces' sake, to knit close again the raveled ties which your eccentricities have—"
"In order to get a box of old duds sent clear from Ireland!"