pplication of which school-boys and even freshmen are often
adept. Eugene made the torture acute, and was apparently enjoying the
work, when suddenly--without any manner of warning--he received an
astounding blow upon the left ear, which half stunned him for the
moment, and sent his hat flying and himself reeling, so great was the
surprise and shock of it. It was not a slap, not an open-handed push,
nothing like it, but a fierce, well-delivered blow from a clinched fist
with the shoulder behind it, and it was the girl who had given it.

"Don't you dare to touch Joe!" she cried, passionately. "Don't you lay
a finger on him."

Furious and red, he staggered round to look at her.

"You wretched little wild-cat, what do you mean by that?" he broke out.

"Don't you touch Joe!" she panted. "Don't you--" Her breath caught
and there was a break in her voice as she faced him. She could not
finish the repetition of that cry, "Don't you touch Joe!"

But there was no break in the spirit, that passion of protection which
had dealt the blow. Both boys looked at her, something aghast.

She stood before them, trembling with rage and shivering with cold in
the sudden wind which had come up. Her hair had fallen and blew across
her streaming face in brown witch-wisps; one of the ill-darned
stockings had come down and hung about her shoe in folds full of snow;
the arm which had lost its sleeve was bare and wet; thin as the arm of
a growing boy, it shook convulsively, and was red from shoulder to
clinched fist. She was covered with snow. Mists of white drift blew
across her, mercifully half veiling her.

Eugene recovered himself. He swung round upon his heel, restored his
hat to his head with precision, picked up his stick and touched his
banjo-case with it.

"Carry that into the house," he said, indifferently, to his
step-brother.

"Don't you do it!" said the girl, hotly, between her chattering teeth.

Eugene turned towards her, wearing the sharp edge of a smile. Not
removing his eyes from her face, he produced with deliberation a flat
silver box from a pocket, took therefrom a cigarette, replaced the box,
extracted a smaller silver box from another pocket, shook out of it a
fusee, slowly lit the cigarette--this in a splendid silence, which he
finally broke to say, languidly, but with particular distinctness:

"Ariel Tabor, go home!"

The girl's teeth stopped chattering, her lips remaining parted; she
shook the hair