“I am amazed—I cannot understand!” Mr. Rosevelt repeated, with a troubled face.
He believed Star to be as pure-minded and as innocent of wrong as a little child.
He had been convinced from what had transpired on the previous Saturday that she loved Archibald Sherbrooke, and not knowing that he was also Lord Carrol, he, of course, was completely puzzled over the mystery.
“I do not see how you dare look any respectable person in the face, and confess what you just have, without seeking to clear yourself,” retorted Mrs. Richards, sternly. “You are compromising your character in the most wretched manner. What can I believe of you—what can any one believe of you, if you own to having been upon such intimate terms with a man of such standing as Lord Carrol, while he is here as the acknowledged suitor of my daughter?”
“The very worst that you can believe, madam,” Star returned, calmly, and meeting the woman’s eye fearlessly, but with a look which made her quail in spite of herself, “can only serve to compromise the man, whose favor and title you appear so anxious to secure, more than it possibly can me. Notwithstanding whatever claim I may have supposed myself to have heretofore possessed upon him, I now most cheerfully resign it in favor of Miss Richards.”
Were ever words so cutting? Was there ever so barbed a sentence so calmly uttered before?
Mrs. Richards ground her teeth with rage over the feet that the man whom poor, despised Star Gladstone thus spurned, believing him to be the very soul of dishonor, she knew Josephine was using all her arts to win, while of course she could not undeceive her because it would spoil her plot.
“You are an insolent, overbearing girl,” she said, in a low, hissing tone, “and I wonder how I have tolerated you in my house as long as I have. I wonder how you dare face me, and use such insulting language to me after your shameless conduct.”
“I am neither insolent nor overbearing, Mrs. Richards. Ever since I came into your house I have striven to do as nearly right as I knew how, and to make as little trouble as possible. It is you who have been overbearing, who have wounded me by insulting the memory of my parents, and have tried to crush and trample upon me. In no way have I rebelled against your authority, except in the determination not to become a common servant and to pursue my education. This I did in justice to myself, and because I had promised my father I would do it. If you have ‘tolerated me in your house,’ believe me, there has been as much toleration exercised upon my part, for in no sense of the word has it been a home to me; instead, it has been merely a place of shelter, a spot to exist in until I could complete my education. I can bear it no longer. I shall consider your house no longer my home,” Star concluded, with a decision which rather startled Mrs. Richards.
But she retorted, derisively: