“Where is it?” he cried, shaking her whole frame with the fury of his grasp—“where is it?—what have you done with it? Restore it instantly, dishonourable fool! Do you think it is anything to you?”
“What, papa?” cried Susan, trembling, and drawing back unawares with a shrinking of terror. It was a strange interruption of her innocent girlish dreams.
“What!” he cried, holding her tighter—“what! Do you dare to ask me? Restore it at once, or I shall be tempted to something beyond reason. Child! idiot! do you think you can cheat me?”
Susan stood still in his hold, shaken by it, and trembling from head to foot—but she shrank no more. “I have never cheated you in all my life,” she said, raising her honest blue eyes to his face—that face which scowled over hers with a devilish force of passion; was it possible that there could be kindred or connection between the two?
He looked at her with a baffled rage, incomprehensible to Susan. “There is neither man nor woman in the world, nor child either, who does not lie to me and deceive me!” said Mr. Scarsdale. “Do you suppose I do not know—do you think I have no eyes to see you smile over that old fool’s fondling letters? Give it up this moment, or I swear to you I will cast you out of my house, and leave you to find your way to him as you can! Give it up at once, I say!”
“Do you mean Uncle Edward’s letter, papa?” asked Susan. “I will get it this moment, if you will let me go; all of them, if you please.”
But instead of letting her go, he grasped her pained arm more fiercely.
“You know what letter I mean,” he said; “that letter which only a fool could have written, and which I was a fool to think of answering. What would you call the child who takes advantage of her father’s absence to go into his room and rob him of it? Was it for love of the writer?—was it for your miserable brother’s information?—or is it a common amusement, which I have only found out because this was done too soon? Thief! have you nothing to say?”
Susan drew herself out of her father’s grasp with a boldness and force altogether unprecedented in her, and grew red over brow, neck, and face.
“I am no thief—I will not be called so!” she said, in sudden provocation; then falling as suddenly out of that unusual self-assertion, she continued, trembling, “Papa, I have never entered your room; I never went into it in my life except when you were there; I never robbed you; I know nothing even of what you mean.”