not annoyed; he was amused. In the insolence of his strength he
mocked at me--at Jenny through me--at me through Jenny. Yet, pervading
it all, there was revealed an interest--a curiosity--about her that
agreed ill with his assumed contemptuousness.

"She's given you her idea of herself--and you've absorbed it. She thinks
she's another Nick Driver--and you're sure of it! It's all flim-flam,
Austin."

"Have it your own way," said I meekly. "It's no affair of mine what you
choose to think."

"Well, that's a more liberal sentiment than one generally hears in this
neighborhood."

He rose and stretched himself, clenching his big fists in the air over
his head. "At any rate she's told me I may take my walks about here as
usual. I'll drop in and have a pipe with you some day."

Another guest proposed himself! I hoped that the company might always
prove harmonious.

"As for Chat," he went on, "I don't want to boast of my conquests--but
she's mine."

"My congratulations are untouched by envy."

"You may live to change your mind about that. Anyhow I hold her in my
hand."

The truth about him was that, as he loved his strength, so, and no less,
he loved the display of it. A common, doubtless not the highest,
characteristic of the strong! Display is apt to pass into boast. He was
not at all loath to hint to me--to force me to guess--that his
encounters in Paris had set him thinking. (If they had set him feeling,
he said nothing about that.) Hence--as I reasoned it--he went on, with a
trifle more than his usual impudence, "Your goose will be cooked when
she marries, though!"

After all, his impudence was good-humored. I retorted in kind. "Perhaps
the husband won't let you walk in the park either!"

"If Fillingford were half a man--Lord, what a chance!"

"You gossip as badly as the women themselves. Why not say young Lacey at
once?"

"The boy? I'd lay him over my knee--at the first word of it."

"He'd stab you under the fifth rib as you did it."

The big man laughed. "Then my one would be worse than his sound dozen!
And what you say isn't at all impossible. He's a fine boy, that! After
all, though, he's inherited his courage. The father's no coward,
either."

We had become engrossed in our interchange of shots--hostile, friendly,
or random. One speaks sometimes just for the repartee, especially when
no more than feeling after the interpretation of a man.

Moreover Loft's approach was always noiseless. On Octon'