"I am very sorry, Victor," she was saying, "but I cannot, and will not. I can't see why you should care."
"But I do care. You know that I have always hated it. And Tommy told me himself that she let him go with the express purpose of making up with you. It is your duty to go back."
Yellow Dog did not understand all of this dialogue, but he knew his master's face as well as his voice, and because he liked the Girl Who Had Sometimes Just Come from a Cat, he would have liked to advise her to lay down her arms at once. "No good opposing him when his eyes are like that," he said to himself; "if it was _me_, I'd just sit up and beg and make him laugh."
But Brigit would not condescend to sit up and beg.
"There's no use in discussing it," she said very coldly, "for I will not go back."
Joyselle watched her in silence for a long time. "Not even if I entreat you?" he asked in a gentle voice.
Her lips tightened, for tenderness with coercion behind it had no delusions for her.
"Not even if you entreat me. I have told you that I dislike my mother and I do not wish to see her. I will not tell you why, and that, at least, you ought to approve of."
"It is horrible for a daughter to say that she does not like her mother----"
"It is horrible for me not to like her, but I can't help it. And it is not horrible for me to tell--anything to you."
But his face did not soften. "I wish you to go to Kingsmead, Brigit."
"Then," his anger now finally blazed up, "I can say only--good-bye."
Her face was as white and as hard as his own, and being a woman she could even laugh.
"What do you mean by that? You will not--surely you cannot mean that you will----"
"But I do!" He himself had suggested a revenge to her. "If you and I quarrel, I will most certainly not marry your son."
For a moment the father in him dominated the mere man, and his eloquence was great as he reproached her.
"No--no, I am not cruel," she answered cruelly, her anger reinforced by a wave of jealousy anent Théo, "but as I do not love him, why should I marry him? And this kind of thing had far better cease. After all, you care for him far more than you care for me."
"Yes, of course you do," she went on in the tone of gentle, unimpassioned reason that women sometimes use in violent anger, to the utter amazement and undoing of their male opponents. "And moreover, I daresay if I really loved you as much as I thought I did, I should be unable to refuse to do what you wish about my mother."