"Never!" declared the Princess, energetically.
"Then I shall sign them alone. In any case the guests will be invited. It is necessary that I should at last take up a position in this matter which is agitating the whole province. It must be known in L---- on which side I am to be found. You are at liberty to be ill on the day in question, or to drive over to your brother's--but I leave you to reflect whether it will be well to make the breach between us public, and therefore irreparable. It is still possible for us to forget this hour and this talk. I shall never remind you of it, when once I am persuaded that my demands have been complied with. It is for you to decide what you will do. I have waited until Leo should be absent, because I know that his hot temper would ill brook such a scene, and because I wish to spare him and Count Morynski the mortification of hearing from my mouth that which it had become absolutely necessary for me to say. They will take it better coming from you. It is not I who wish for a rupture."
"And if I decline to comply with the tyrannical commands you think fit to hurl at me," said the Princess, slowly; "if, to your recognised right of inheritance, I oppose my right as your father's widow, whom an unjust, unprecedented will alone banished from a place which should have been her dower-house? I know that in a court of law I should not be able to make good my claim; but the conviction of its justice makes me feel that here, on this ground, I have no need to yield to you, and yield I will not. The Princess Baratowska, after what she has just heard from your lips, would have gone with her son, gone, never to return; but the former mistress of Wilicza maintains her right. Beware, Waldemar. I may one day place you in such a pass that you must either recall the arbitrary words you have just spoken, or give up your mother and brother to an evil fate."
"Try," said Waldemar, coldly; "but do not hold me responsible for what may then happen."
They stood face to face, their eyes fixed on each other, and it was strange that a resemblance which had hitherto escaped all those about them, with one single exception, should now have stood out in strong relief. "That brow with the singularly marked vein he has from you," Wanda had one day said to her aunt; and there, indeed, was the same high arch, denoting power, the same peculiar line on the temple. In her excitement the blue vein now showed distinctly on the Princess's forehead; while on Waldemar's it swelled forth ominously, as though all his blood in revolt were seeking vent that way. On both faces the same expression was stamped, that of an unbending determination, an iron will, prepared to carry through its purposes at any cost. Now that they were declaring war to the death, the fact that these two were mother and son became for the first time palpable, perhaps it now for the first time impressed itself strongly on their minds.