like the hatred of a maniac. He
thrilled with renewed terror as the boy once more sprang to him like an
animal, and with a growl in his throat rushed toward the portrait.

"Stop!" he shouted, and the boy almost cringed to a halt in the middle
of the floor.

When, after his first chill of horror at the act itself, Henry Montagu
realized that the desecration was his own thought, his own impulse
carried into fierce determination, he sank weak and dizzy into the chair
that the boy had left. But again he mastered his frightened mind and
thrust away from it the sinister oppression of omen and coincidence.
Unwillingly but helplessly, he was letting into his thoughts the theory
that, after he had opened the door instead of before he had opened it,
the room had been harboring a maniac. And the theory stabbed him. A
mushroom growth of tenderness had germinated in his pity and was growing
nearer and nearer to a personal liking for the beautiful, pathetic
figure of youth that stood before him, wilted and helpless again, in the
center of the room.

"My boy," he said quietly, "I ought to resent that but strangely enough
I don't find myself resenting the idea of your taking strange liberties
in my house. In fact, I--I had that same impulse. I nearly did that
myself, just before you burst in here."

The young man looked at him in amazement.

"_You_ were going to turn--Mrs. Montagu's picture to the wall? Wh--why,
you old dirty beast!"

To Henry Montagu there was no vulgarity in the words. Their huge
reproach of him drove every other quality out of them and a deep color
into his face.

"But I--I quelled the impulse. And y--you would actually have done it!"
he stammered.

"I had a reason and a right to!" cried the young man. "I'd never seen it
before and if it repelled me I had a right never to look at it again!
But she was _your wife_!"

Once more he stood, his eyes avoiding the portrait and wandering
hungrily about the rest of the beautiful room.

"Well," he said, after a few moments, "good-by!" And he walked toward
the door.

"Stop!" cried Mr. Montagu again. He sat forward on the edge of the
chair, trembling. After hours of successive surprises, the simple
announcement of his visitor's departure had struck him cold with the
accumulated force of his past lonely terror and his present intense
curiosity. Again the boy had obeyed his command with a visible shiver,
and it hurt the older man by recalling to him the suggestion