I can't help thinking he'd give me a special
kind of pleasure."

"Would he?" She asked it wistfully. He had opened the windows of their
house to strange discords from without. "What kind of pleasure?"

He was glad to tell. The magnitude and newness of his emotion that day
made it something to be flaunted while the disturbed currents of his
blood kept their fervor. Later he might put it to the test of equable
judgment. Now it was all a glory of hot action.

"Playmate," he said, "I wanted to kill him."

"My father? Oh, why, why?"

"Maybe for your sake. Yes! there was an instant when I said I would kill
him and free you from him." She could not answer. He heard the rustle of
her dress and added quickly, "Now, don't go. Of all nights, to-night is
the night I can't spare you."

"I thought it was the one when you didn't need me."

"I need you to listen. I'm a blaring, trumpeting egotist to-night.
Please understand me! Stop being a woman a minute, and see how it would
seem to be a man--not like me, but free to live and sin and refuse to
sin."

"You are free," she said, in her low, pained voice. "You have refused
all the ignoble things."

"Ah, but I didn't even parley with them. I wish I could feel I'd whacked
them and broken their skulls instead of going the other way."

"Playmate," she cried, "you are all wrong. You must not parley with
them. You must refuse to look at them."

"Refuse to look at the worm that eats the root? No. Find him and stamp
on him. The worst of it is, I begin to be rather terrified. I see that
life is a bigger thing than I thought."

"Not to grannie. To her it's big and simple."

"Because she knows the way. Well, what if there are many ways,--not like
hers, not the true way,--but ways we ought to look at before we can say
we know life at all? Think of it, playmate. You are a woman, younger
than I, delicate as a rose; yet you know more about life than I. You
know how to meet men and women. There aren't surprises you can't
master."

She sat wondering what it was that had moved him, and whether it was not
simply the power of MacLeod's personality, equally compelling to love or
hate. But Osmond was going on in that fierce monologue.

"I feel as if I had been waked up. Once I had my riding dream. Now I
have a million dreams. Did I tell you my riding dream? Some
nights--chiefly when there's a moon--I wake and lie there and fancy I am
on a horse. There's the smell of the horse and the leath