lf, and upon his guard with a wariness in which she was
sometimes surprised to believe that she saw an almost haggard
apprehension.

He did not answer her question, and it seemed to her, as she continued
steadily to meet his hot eyes, that he was trying to hold himself under
some measure of control; and a vain effort it proved.

"You go back to my house!" he burst out, shouting hoarsely. "You get
back there! You stay there!"

"No," she said, moving between him and the door. "Mamie and I are
going for a drive."

"You go back to my house!" He followed her, waving an arm fiercely at
her. "Don't you come around here trying to run over me! You talk
about your 'affairs'! All you've got on earth is this two-for-a-nickel
old shack over your head and a bushel-basket of distillery stock that
you can sell by the pound for old paper!" He threw the words in her
face, the bull-bass voice seamed and cracked with falsetto. "Old
paper, old rags, old iron, bottles, old clothes! You talk about your
affairs! Who are you? Rothschild? You haven't GOT any affairs!"

Not a look, not a word, not a motion of his escaped her in all the fury
of sound and gesture in which he seemed fairly to envelop himself;
least of all did that shaking of his--the quivering of jaw and temple,
the tumultuous agitation of his hands--evade her watchfulness.

"When did you find this out?" she said, very quickly. "After you
became administrator?"

He struck the back of the chair she had vacated a vicious blow with his
open hand. "No, you spendthrift! All there was TO your grandfather
when you buried him was a basket full of distillery stock, I tell you!
Old paper! Can't you hear me? Old paper, old rags--"

"You have sent me the same income," she lifted her voice to interrupt;
"you have made the same quarterly payments since his death that you
made before. If you knew, why did you do that?"

He had been shouting at her with the frantic and incredulous
exasperation of an intolerant man utterly unused to opposition; his
face empurpled, his forehead dripping, and his hands ruthlessly
pounding the back of the chair; but this straight question stripped him
suddenly of gesture and left him standing limp and still before her,
pale splotches beginning to show on his hot cheeks.

"If you knew, why did you do it?" she repeated. "You wrote me that my
income was from dividends, and I knew and thought nothing about it; but
if the stock which came to me