sure you could." For an instant Jeff did not feel the point, and
he had not the magnanimity, when he did, to own himself touched again.
Apparently, if this girl could not rattle him, she could beat him at
fence, and the will to dominate her began to stir in him. If he could
have thought of any sarcasm, no matter how crushing, he would have come
back at her with it. He could not think of anything, and he walked at her
side, inwardly chafing for the chance which would not come.

When they reached her door there was a young man at the lock with a
latch-key, which he was not making work, for, after a bated blasphemy of
his failure, he turned and twitched the bell impatiently.

Miss Lynde laughed provokingly, and he looked over his shoulder at her
and at Jeff, who felt his injury increased by the disadvantage this young
man put him at. Jeff was as correctly dressed; he wore a silk hat of the
last shape, and a long frock-coat; he was properly gloved and shod; his
clothes fitted him, and were from the best tailor; but at sight of this
young man in clothes of the same design he felt ill-dressed. He was in
like sort aware of being rudely blocked out physically, and coarsely
colored as to his blond tints of hair and eye and cheek. Even the
sinister something in the young man's look had distinction, and there was
style in the signs of dissipation in his handsome face which Jeff saw
with a hunger to outdo him.

Miss Lynde said to Jeff, "My brother, Mr. Durgin," and then she added to
the other, "You ought to ring first, Arthur, and try your key afterward."

"The key's all right," said the young man, without paying any attention
to Jeff beyond a glance of recognition; he turned his back, and waited
for the door to be opened.

His sister suggested, with an amiability which Jeff felt was meant in
reparation to him, "Perhaps a night latch never works before dark--or
very well before midnight." The door was opened, and she said to Jeff,
with winning entreaty, "Won't you come in, Mr. Durgin?"

Jeff excused himself, for he perceived that her politeness was not so
much an invitation to him as a defiance to her brother; he gave her
credit for no more than it was worth, and he did not wish any the less to
get even with her because of it.

XXX.

At dinner, in the absence of the butler, Alan Lynde attacked his sister
across the table for letting herself be seen with a jay, who was not only
a jay, but a cad, and personally so offe