"Ah, do not call me that!" she retorted. "My hope, joy, honour, are in this house, and you have disgraced it! My brother is a McMurrough, and what have you made of him? He cowers before your eye! He has no will but yours! He is as good as dumb—before his master! You flog us like children, but you forget that we are grown, and that it is more than the body that smarts. It is shame we feel—shame so bitter that if a look could lay you dead at my feet, though it cost us all, though it left us beggared, I would look it joyfully—were I alone! But you, cowardly interloper, a schemer living on our impotence, walk on and trample upon us——"
"Enough," Colonel Sullivan cried, intolerable pain in his voice. "You win! You have a heart harder than the millstone, more set than ice! I call you to witness I have struggled hard, I have struggled hard, girl——"
"For the mastery," she cried venomously. "And for your master, the devil!"
"No," he replied, more quietly. "I think for God. If I was wrong, may He forgive me!"
"I never will!" she protested.
"I shall not ask for your forgiveness," he retorted. He looked at her silently, and then, in an altered tone, "The more," he said, "as my mind is changed again. Ay, thank God, changed again. A minute ago I was weak; now I am strong, and I will do my duty as I have set myself to do it. When I came here I came to be a peacemaker, I came to save the great from his folly and the poor from his ignorance, to shield the house of my fathers from ruin and my kin from the gaol and the gibbet. And I stand here still, and I shall persist—I shall persist."
"You will?" she exclaimed.
"I shall! I shall remain and persist."
Passion choked her. She could not find words. After all she had said he would persist. He was not to be moved—he would persist. He would still trample upon them, still be master. The house was no longer theirs, nor was anything theirs. They were to have no life, no will, no freedom—while he lived. Ah, while he lived. She made an odd gesture with her hands, and turned and went up the stairs, leaving him master of the field. The worse for him! The worse, the worse, the worse for him!