"I will not obey you, madame!" she replied.
"What?" almost shrieked Mrs. Carew.
"I will not obey you!" she repeated, with flashing eyes. "I will not run after Mr. Chainey, as you pretend so falsely that I am doing, and I will make no unmaidenly overtures toward his acquaintance, but if the proper opportunity offers for me to know and thank him for saving my life, I shall surely avail myself of it!"
They stood glaring at each other, the girl roused into furious rebellion, the woman speechless with fury, her steel-blue eyes seeming to emit electric sparks from her deathly white face, so intense was her fierce wrath. Controlling herself with an effort, she turned to leave the room, and, pausing on the threshold, hissed back one significant sentence at the defiant girl:
"Forewarned is forearmed!"
"I do not fear you!" Kathleen answered; but Mrs. Carew never looked back.
"What will she do? What can she do? She will never dare lock me in my room, as she threatened!" Kathleen murmured, uneasily, and then her overstrained nerves gave way. She threw herself on the bed and sobbed aloud, in nervous abandonment to her outraged feelings.
God help that poor, motherless girl! She knew that the events of that night would only make her life harder than it had been before under the roof that her step-mother ruled with an iron hand.
The beautiful young heiress did not have a happy life, in spite of all the good gifts with which fate had so richly dowered her at her birth. Her step-mother had always hated her, and never relaxed her efforts to harden her father's heart against his only child. Perhaps she hated Kathleen the more because Heaven had denied any children to her second marriage, and she knew that to this girl would go the bulk of her father's great wealth.
Mrs. Carew had two children by her first marriage—a son, now twenty-three, called Ivan, and the girl Alpine. Her favorite scheme was to marry the hated Kathleen to this son, so that he might share her rich inheritance. Failing in this, she meant, if it lay in the power of a human devil to compass it, to have Kathleen disgraced and disinherited, so that she and her children might enjoy the whole of the great Carew fortune.