“None.”
“Have you no clue to the place of her flight?”
“None.”
“You have taken no steps in the matter whatever?”
“None.”
“Very extraordinary conduct; Mistress Grahame;” he cried; with a brow of crimson—“a very unsatisfactory delay; madam.”
She glanced at him with her dull gray eyes.
“You are the head of the house; Grahame,” she replied. “You, as such, will take the steps you deem expedient. For myself, I, as a representative of a line whose annals are unstained, will never permit a degenerate child to continue to move in the same circle, or breathe the same air as myself. She has forgotten her position, her dignity, her blood. She has forfeited her claim to her name; and, therefore, with her own hand, has sundered the ties of affinity. In my eyes she is dead.”
Again a low cry of acute grief burst from Evangeline.
“Dead?”—repeated Mrs. Grahame, only a little more emphatically for the interruption—“sunk into the depths of a grave from which there is no earthly redemption. Mr. Grahame, your and my daughter, Margaret Claverhouse, is now the eldest female representative of our name in your family, and from this moment it will be so understood. Margaret we will retire.”