st out:

"You cur! You scum! You vermin! Do you mean to tell me that blood of
my race has suffered a blow and crawled to a court of law about it?
Answer me!"

Tom's head drooped, and he answered with an eloquent silence. His uncle
stared at him with a mixed expression of amazement and shame and
incredulity that was sorrowful to see. At last he said:

"Which of the twins was it?"

"Count Luigi."

"You have challenged him?"

"N--no," hesitated Tom, turning pale.

"You will challenge him tonight. Howard will carry it."

Tom began to turn sick, and to show it. He turned his hat round and
round in his hand, his uncle glowering blacker and blacker upon him as
the heavy seconds drifted by; then at last he began to stammer, and said
piteously:

"Oh, please, don't ask me to do it, uncle! He is a murderous devil--I
never could--I--I'm afraid of him!"

Old Driscoll's mouth opened and closed three times before he could get it
to perform its office; then he stormed out:

"A coward in my family! A Driscoll a coward! Oh, what have I done to
deserve this infamy!" He tottered to his secretary in the corner,
repeated that lament again and again in heartbreaking tones, and got out
of a drawer a paper, which he slowly tore to bits, scattering the bits
absently in his track as he walked up and down the room, still grieving
and lamenting. At last he said:

"There it is, shreds and fragments once more--my will. Once more you
have forced me to disinherit you, you base son of a most noble father!
Leave my sight! Go--before I spit on you!"

The young man did not tarry. Then the judge turned to Howard:

"You will be my second, old friend?"

"Of course."

"There is pen and paper. Draft the cartel, and lose no time."

"The Count shall have it in his hands in fifteen minutes," said Howard.

Tom was very heavyhearted. His appetite was gone with his property and
his self-respect. He went out the back way and wandered down the obscure
lane grieving, and wondering if any course of future conduct, however
discreet and carefully perfected and watched over, could win back his
uncle's favor and persuade him to reconstruct once more that generous
will which had just gone to ruin before his eyes. He finally concluded
that it could. He said to himself that he had accomplished this sort of
triumph once already, and that what had been done once could be done
again. He would set about it. He would bend every energy to th