these vestiges of a barbarism which
his children had never even conceived, and now he threw them out in all
their crudity at his daughter. And when she did not blench, he began to
accuse her as men were used to accuse their daughters in the bright days
of the Sailor King. He invented enormities which she had committed, and
there would have been no obscene infamy of which Maggie was not guilty,
if Edwin--more by instinct than by volition--had not pushed open the
door and entered the drawing-room.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TWO.

He was angry, and the sight of the flushed meekness of his sister, as
she leaned quietly with her back against an easy-chair, made him
angrier.

"Enough of this!" he said gruffly and peremptorily.

Darius, with scarcely a break, continued.

"I say enough of this!" Edwin cried, with increased harshness.

The old man paused, half intimidated. With his pimpled face and glaring
eyes, his gleaming gold teeth, his frowziness of a difficult invalid,
his grimaces and gestures which were the result of a lifetime devoted to
gain, he made a loathsome object. Edwin hated him, and there was a
bitter contempt in his hatred.

"I'm going to have that spawn, and I'm going to have some change! Give
me some money!" Darius positively hissed.

Edwin grew nearly capable of homicide. All the wrongs that he had
suffered leaped up and yelled.

"You'll have no money!" he said, with brutal roughness. "And you'll
grow no mushrooms! And let that be understood once for all! You've got
to behave in this house."

Darius flickered up.

"Do you hear?" Edwin stamped on the conflagration.

It was extinguished. Darius, cowed, slowly and clumsily directed
himself towards the door. Once Edwin had looked forward to a moment
when he might have his father at his mercy, when he might revenge
himself for the insults and the bullying that had been his. Once he had
clenched his fist and his teeth, and had said, "When you're old, and
I've got you, and you can't help yourself!" That moment had come, and
it had even enabled and forced him to refuse money to his father--refuse
money to his father! As he looked at the poor figure fumbling towards
the door, he knew the humiliating paltriness of revenge. As his anger
fell, his shame grew.

Maggie lifted her eyebrows when Darius banged the door.

"He can't help it," she said.

"Of course he can't help it," said Ed