"Sir, I go with my Lady Bellair, driven from my father's house by one who calls himself my brother. My lawyer shall make inquiries."
She would have left the room, but he intercepted her. "Florimel," he said, "you are casting the pearl of your womanhood before a swine. He will trample it under his feet and turn again and rend you. He will treat you worse still than poor Lizzy, whom he troubles no more with his presence." He had again taken her arm in his great grasp.
"Let me go. You are brutal. I shall scream."
"You shall not go until you have heard all the truth."
"What! more truth still? Your truth is anything but pleasant."
"It is more unpleasant yet than you surmise. Florimel, you have driven me to it. I would have prepared you a shield against the shock which must come, but you compel me to wound you to the quick. I would have had you receive the bitter truth from lips you loved, but you drove those lips of honor from you, and now there are left to utter it only the lips you hate. Yet the truth you shall receive: it may help to save you from weakness, arrogance and falsehood. Sister, your mother was never Lady Lossie."
"You lie! I know you lie! Because you wrong me, you would brand me with dishonor, to take from me as well the sympathy of the world. But I defy you."
"Alas! there is no help, sister. Your mother indeed passed as Lady Lossie, but my mother, the true Lady Lossie, was alive all the time, and in truth died only last year. For twenty years my mother suffered for yours. In the eye of the law you are no better than the little child his father denied in your presence. Give that man his dismissal, or he will give you yours. Never doubt it. Refuse again, and I go from this room to publish in the next the fact that you are neither Lady Lossie nor Lady Florimel Colonsay. You have no right to any name but your mother's. You are Miss Gordon."
She gave a great gasp at the word, but bravely fought the horror that was taking possession of her. She stood with one hand on the back of a chair, her face white, her eyes starting, her mouth a little open and rigid—her whole appearance, except for the breath that came short and quick, that of one who had died in sore pain.
"All that is now left you," concluded Malcolm, "is the choice between sending Liftore away and being abandoned by him. That choice you must now make."