protection against the importunate--as if she had been an English girl.
It was an idiotic thing to do."

"Because?" Mount Dunstan for the moment had lost his head. Anstruthers
had maddeningly paused.

"She answered that if it became necessary she might perhaps be able to
protect herself. She was as cool and frank as a boy. No air pince about
it--merely consciousness of being able to put things in their right
places. Made a mere male relative feel like a fool."

"When ARE things in their right places?" To his credit be it spoken,
Mount Dunstan managed to say it as if in the mere putting together of
idle words. What man likes to be reminded of his right place! No man
wants to be put in his right place. There is always another place which
seems more desirable.

"She knows--if we others do not. I suppose my right place is at
Stornham, conducting myself as the brother-in-law of a fair American
should. I suppose yours is here--shut up among your closed corridors and
locked doors. There must be a lot of them in a house like this. Don't
you sometimes feel it too large for you?"

"Always," answered Mount Dunstan.

The fact that he added nothing else and met a rapid side glance with
unmoving red-brown eyes gazing out from under rugged brows, perhaps
irritated Anstruthers. He had been rather enjoying himself, but he had
not enjoyed himself enough. There was no denying that his plaything had
not openly flinched. Plainly he was not good at flinching. Anstruthers
wondered how far a man might go. He tried again.

"She likes the place, though she has a natural disdain for its
condition. That is practical American. Things which are going to pieces
because money is not spent upon them--mere money, of which all the
people who count for anything have so much--are inevitably rather
disdained. They are 'out of it.' But she likes the estate." As he
watched Mount Dunstan he felt sure he had got it at last--the right
thing. "If you were a duke with fifty thousand a year," with a
distinctly nasty, amicably humorous, faint laugh, "she would--by the
Lord, I believe, she would take it over--and you with it."

Mount Dunstan got up. In his rough walking tweeds he looked
over-big--and heavy--and perilous. For two seconds Nigel Anstruthers
would not have been surprised if he had without warning slapped his
face, or knocked him over, or whirled him out of his chair and kicked
him. He would not have liked it, but--for two seconds--it would hav