Beware
how you anger such! Your father too. He would be conciliated now, by
what would once have incensed him. Evelyn Erie is rich, Miriam Monfort
is poor; why need I add another word? The suggestion is perfect."
Coldly, silently, angrily, he left the room. I heard him stamp
impatiently at the hall-door, at some delay apparently in undoing its
fastenings--his childish habit when provoked--such was his haste to be
gone.
Yet I could scarcely judge, from what had just occurred, taking this,
too, in connection with what had passed long before, when I alone was
the injured and forgiving one, that I had drawn down upon my head his
eternal enmity.
But thus it proved.
CHAPTER IX.
Months passed away--months of dreary, monotonous despondency, through
which ran a vein of anxiety that banished peace. During all this time
matters went on pretty much as they had done before, with one exception,
I held no further intercourse with Mr. Basil Bainrothe. Claude was
absent most of this time on business, for a firm with which he had
lately connected himself, and on the few occasions of his presence at
Monfort Hall treated me with marked formality.
Evelyn had affected to make light of Mr. Bainrothe's outrage toward me,
though far from defending him. "Men of his years do these things
sometimes," she said, "under the mask of playfulness and fatherly
feeling, and, however unpleasant it may be to bear them, one has to pass
them over.
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