"Ah, yes, you're brave," Elizabeth flung at her father. "You're so certain that girl will keep her promise, aren't you? Well, I happen to have been informed, on very good authority, that she intends to betray you. She had made the statement that she'll marry Donald if he asks her—again."
"The girl doesn't impress me as one who would lie, Elizabeth. Who told you this?"
"Andrew Daney."
"Bear with me a moment, son, till I call Andrew on the telephone," the Laird requested, and went into the telephone booth under the stairs in the reception hall. When he emerged a few minutes later his face was pale and haggard.
"Well? What did I tell you?" Elizabeth's voice was triumphant.
Her father ignored her. Placing himself squarely before his son, he bent forward slightly and thrust his aggressive face close to Donald's. "I command you to respect the honor of my house," he cried furiously. "For the last time, Donald McKaye, ha' done wie this woman, or—" and his great arm was outflung in a swooping gesture that denoted all too forcibly the terrible sentence he shrank from speaking.
"Are you offering me an alternative?" Donald's voice was low and very calm, but his brown eyes were blazing with suppressed rage. "The Dreamerie or—" and he swung and pointed to the Brent cottage far below them on the Sawdust Pile.
"Aye," his father cried in a hard cracked voice. "Aye!"
Donald looked over at his mother with the helplessness of a child who has fallen and hurt himself. "And you, mother? What do you say to this?"
She thought she would faint. "You—you must obey your father," she quavered. Until her son should marry Nan Brent she could not force herself to the belief that he could possibly commit such an incredible offense.