“Yes, sir.”
“Edith Dalton, if you dare to defy me in this thing, I’ll make your life so miserable that you will wish you were dead,” he said, in concentrated tones of passion.
She paled again at the fearful words, and a keen pain smote her heart that her own father should speak thus to her; then she replied, steadily:
“I have no wish to defy you, sir, but——”
“But you will not obey me—you would set my authority aside if you could,” he interrupted.
“I acknowledge your authority as the highest of any on earth, and I will yield you cheerful obedience in all that is right—beyond that I cannot go, I will not go. I have reached an age where I am capable of judging for myself upon all moral questions, and I must exercise that judgment.”
“This is a point of business, upon which you set aside my wishes and my authority,” he said, moodily, and his eyes wavering uneasily beneath her steady gaze.
“It involves the principles of right and wrong also. I promised that Earle Wayne should have this money, and if you will not let me give it to him now, I shall pay it to him, as I said, a year from now, with interest.”
He knew she meant it, and, in his passion, he half raised his clenched hand as if to strike her.
But the soft blue eyes, with the keen pain in them, disarmed him, and it dropped heavily back upon the arm of his chair.